#femslash fandom

[fanlore-wiki]

Featured Article: Sapphic September

This week's Featured Article is Sapphic September!

Sapphic September is an annual autumnal challenge focused on creating fanworks for wlw ships.  It began as a simple tag on Tumblr that morphed into a recurring challenge that has had different moderators taking up the mantle over the years.  In its current form, a month's worth of prompts is provided to inspire fans.

To find out more about the history of this challenge, visit the Fanlore page!

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[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - the "Mature" rating was ranked most enjoyed by consumers, while those posting works most frequently posted "Teen and Up". Only 16% of those who had posted works to AO3 said they had never posted M/M, while 69% of consumers "Strongly Enjoyed" M/M works.

To see more analysis, including transcripts of all the data shown on the graphs, please view the full results on AO3 for both ratings and relationship types.

[trigunsapphicweek]

Question time... Here is our (Official) Interest Check!

Official Interest Check

This form is to collect very basic information about potential participants, and in addition, to gain an idea of how this event should be pl

Thank you for your patience! I would appreciate if people shared this btw!! Thank you!!

Form will close sometime in October!

[centrumlumina]

Did your ship make the top 10?

The top 100 AO3 ships of 2023 are now available to view on my AO3.

[dkc2017]

There have been a healthy number of tears here tonight as I’ve watched the Hacks finale. This isn’t a reflection at all on the episode, well mostly isn’t, it’s a reflection on the fact that this is the first season of Hacks I have watched without my wife who I lost last fall. She existed on Tumblr for a decade before I ever did. She watched all the best television shows and interacted with fandom in many ways while I watched a few shows and wrote fanfiction about them. This is where our worlds came together. We got married not much after the first season of Hacks aired. We were these people who found each other through the things we love and then loved each other with everything we had. So while I know the Hacks journey isn’t over and I’ll continue to say hello in the space to all of you, I still don’t know if I’ll ever write fanfiction again and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be as invested in characters quite the same, but what I do know is that you all are an amazing bunch of humans. A couple of you have become dear friends. And I thank you for that. From the bottom of my broken heart.

[serialsensation]

Fan Reading Project Recruitment!

Are you a fan, especially a femslash fan, who's interested in reading a funky little (~30 pp.) piece of 19th C. mass-popular literature serialized over several weeks? If so, I've got the project for you! Join us for a casual, opt-in reading group of a short 19th C. dime novel, beginning January 15, 2024!

You can sign up here if you're interested!

More on the Project:

I'm a PhD Candidate in English and Women's and Gender Studies working on a dissertation on nineteenth-century American working-class women, queer pleasure and possibility, and mass-popular literature. As part of my project, I've spent a lot of time in archives reading 19th C. story papers and dime novels, genres of degraded literature that were incredibly popular among factory and mill workers but that have received very little scholarly attention. What's fascinating is how similar this mass-popular literature is to fan fiction--not just in its sensational plots and queer elements (sometimes there really is just one bed in the cabin), but especially in how it was consumed (often in serial format, shared amongst exuberant, fannish communities who even had their own shipping wars in the letters to the editor columns!) and in how it was critiqued (before Anthony Comstock came for pornography, he led a whole campaign against this kind of literature as "perverting" and tending to promote "evil reading"). Although I'm a fan myself, I know that one person's readings can never fully capture the wide variety of responses and interpretations that a whole group of fans and consumers can have, which is where you all come in! For the final chapter of my dissertation, I'll be serially disseminating chapters of a short dime novel for a group of participants to discuss in a private Discord to explore the creative possibilities of fan reading practices.

You're welcome to be as involved as you would like - maybe you just end up reading along and reacting to the comments of others, or perhaps you find yourself writing fan meta or even making memes and other creative responses! If you have any questions, feel free to DM me here!

If you'd like to sign up (which doesn't obligate you to participate), you can use the following Qualtrics link, which provides more information about the project, including the study number for the IRB-issued exemption: https://umich.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1HAkpIJDEaUfWOa

[sapphicscholar]

If you signed up for the inaugural Hacks Winter Gift Exchange, check your emails because prompts have officially been sent out!!

You’ll have until December 20th to fill either of your gift recipient’s 2 prompts, and instructions about where to upload your creation have all been been included at the bottom of the email.

We’re asking gifters to keep their assignments a surprise until the day of the reveal, so please feel free to share excitement about the event but keep specifics to yourself :)

And as always, feel free to be in touch with any questions! I’m coming up on a major research deadline and then finals and grading, but I’ll do my best to respond as promptly as I can!