This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.
I’d already been in femslash fandom for years before I thought about learning more about femslash history.
I started out in fandom with a het ship - Star Trek: Voyager’s Janeway and Chakotay - and I only really discovered femslash because of Minerva McGonagall. I was obsessed with her, and I was determined to find fic that featured her prominently. So much of what I discovered was femslash, and not only that, it was good femslash. The stories being told were full of rich, complex relationships between women, and incredibly encouraging to me, in my early twenties and not yet out as queer even to myself.
After that I found Doctor Who femslash - a magical playground of possibilities where half the fun was getting two women to actually meet - and then I looped back around to my roots and relaunched into Star Trek fandom, this time fully aware of the scope for connections between women in its detailed and sprawling universe.
So I’d been in femslash fandom, mostly in those three fandoms but dabbling all over the place in corners both large and small, for maybe a decade when a friend said: “So, I know that slash fandom began with Kirk/Spock, but how did femslash fandom get started?”
And I had to admit that I was stumped.
I confessed to my friend that I didn’t have a clue, that I knew almost nothing about the history of femslash beyond a handful of things about Xena fandom and my own hazy memories. I realised that I’ absorbed a lot of dudeslash knowledge by fannish osmosis, but that hadn’t happened in the same way with femslash. On the way home that afternoon I decided that I was going to find out everything I could.
Information was out there, but it was hard to find, scattered across the internet, not gathered in any one place. I opened about a million tabs, following dead links and googling names and titles. I started putting some of what I’d found into the Femslash article on Fanlore. I asked around, got fannish acquaintances to share their own memories. My wife effortlessly reeled off a list of about twenty popular femslash pairings from the late 1990s and early 2000s. A friend of a friend on Twitter shared a huge archive of old femslash vids. There was so much to learn and discover.
Since then I’ve been doing research on this topic whenever I get a chance, and here are a few things I’ve found out:
The first extant femslash fic that we can date for definite, which has recognisable characters and which is undeniably classable as femslash, is a Star Trek fic called Kismet, published in 1977. It’s a Chapel/Uhura story that explores their feelings about carrying on a hidden relationship.
The first modern-day fandom to be dominated by a femslash pairing was Cagney and Lacey, a (wonderful!) show about two women cops that ran from 1981-1988. The show had a large, enthusiastic and creative following among women, particularly queer women, many of whom shipped Cagney and Lacey.
Plenty of fandoms had femslash contingents before the femslash explosion that was the Xena fandom - not just Star Trek but Blake’s 7, The X-Files, Forever Knight and Babylon 5.
The Xena fandom and its concept that Xena and Gabrielle would remain soulmates through multiple reincarnations played a huge role in popularising the setting-change AUs that are ubiquitous in fandom today.
Femslash vidding probably got started sometime in the late 1990s - the arrival of digital vidding coincided with the ascent of a few key femslash pairings to create an explosion of vidding creativity in femslash circles.
Femslash, as a community and as a body of fannish literature and art, is growing, thriving, and more popular and varied now than it’s ever been.
Maybe all of this was common knowledge and I just managed to miss out, but I don’t think so. I was part of a panel on the history of femslash at a convention last summer and the room was full, the mood excited. People asked a lot of questions. I know there are some folks who knew a lot of this already, but there are also people like me who are eager to learn.
I’m still trying to figure out ways to find more information about the early days of femslash - details are especially sparse when you get back to the 1970s and 1980s. Someday I’d like to have the time and the resources to really delve into investigating it, but for now I’m trying to increase my knowledge in smaller ways. I find what zines I can, I read the work of fannish historians, and I’ve just started a collaborative femslash timeline in Google Docs that anyone can contribute to. Whatever your place in the femslash community, you’re welcome to come and share your memories of fandoms and pairings both big and small!
These days I write mostly Star Trek femslash and femgen, which can be found on my AO3 here. My Femslash Timeline Google Doc is here.
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