Femslash Is a Political Act (and Other Observations of Tolkien Fandom's Genre Non Grata) by Dawn Walls-Thumma

In our last Cultus Dispatches column, I interviewed Elleth, who has been one of the Tolkien fandom's leaders in promoting not just writing about women but femslash in particular. With multiple events focusing on women characters and femslash and femslash fanworks appearing regularly in Silmarillion tags, it is easy to forget that it is a relatively new genre to the fandom—and not just new but arriving in a political climate that was often openly hostile not just to writing about women but also to even a hint of LGBTQIA+ content in fanfiction.

Given that, I was curious what femslash writing and reading look like in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom today and in years past. To begin to understand how this new genre is faring amidst its more venerable companions, I analyzed Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data related to writing and reading femslash.

The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey was conducted by me in 2015 and 2020, the latter survey in collaboration with Maria K. Alberto. The number of valid responses in 2015 was 1,052 and in 2020 was 746. This article looks at what the data from the two surveys shows about participants' attitudes and practices regarding the femslash genre: stories about women in a romantic or sexual relationship with other women. It is important to recognize the limitations of any quantitative research—limitations that can be exacerbated by the fact that numerical data can feel more factual than qualitative information—but especially survey research. Participants in the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey were asked to provide demographic information about themselves and then respond to a series of statements on their beliefs and habits around reading and/or writing Tolkien-based fanfiction. The choices for the vast majority of these items were Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and No Opinion/Not Sure. The survey was anonymous, and all items were optional. Nonetheless, survey research always runs the risk that participants will not be honest or may not even self-assess their own beliefs and behaviors accurately. Therefore, the data and analysis presented here should be considered only one perspective on femslash in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom, is not a "final word" on the subject, and should ideally be used in conjunction with other research methods.

All Genres Are Not Created Equal

The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey asked readers and writers about four genres: femslash, genfic, het, and slash. Historically, these genres were used by Tolkien fanfiction groups and archives to identify the group's purpose (e.g., Library of Moria was a slash archive), to exclude certain types of stories—specifically, many archives and groups did not allow slash—and to classify or label stories for readers. Femslash was historically not a separate genre and was not commonly written, although it was usually permitted on slash sites. The Library of Moria, for example, accepted femslash.

The graphs below show the percentage of survey participants who responded in various ways to the statement "I identify myself as a [x] writer," where [x] is one of the four genres.¹

Authors do not equally prefer the four genres. Authors identify² least often as femslash writers, which is true in the 2015 data as well—in fact, the number of authors who agree or strongly agree with the statement "I identify myself as a femslash writer" dropped slightly, from 17% in 2015 to 15% in 2020. (Likely, this difference is not statistically significant.³)

Given the Tolkien fanfiction fandom's history, this isn't particularly surprising. We've spent the last several months documenting some of the history around writing about women in the Tolkien fandom, and it can be summed up as subtly discouraged at best to, often, openly hostile. The lack of canonical women hobbles the endeavor from the get-go, but overt hostility towards stories focused on women and anxiety around the "Mary Sue" phenomenon was cited by many authors as exerting a chilling effect on their desire to add more women to their stories. Femslash, of course, compounds this: By necessity, it requires the author to include not just a woman but two women characters.

The genres of Tolkienfic as they were historically understood—slash, het, and gen—also left femslash to fall between the cracks. Archives and groups for sexually explicit fanfiction often focused on either male/male slash or heterosexual pairings, and archives aimed at genfic often attracted audiences who didn't want sexual content in their fanfiction at all … or they banned slash, which of course included femslash as well. Historically, then, femslash found itself without much of a place to go, a sort of genre non grata.

However, as the recent article series has also shown, reception toward women-centric fanfiction has improved in recent years (though some authors continue to describe impacts from the fandom's earlier history). Furthermore, as many of the Tolkien-specific groups and archives have closed or gone inactive and fans have migrated to multifandom platforms like the Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Tumblr, those genre boundaries have eased. One might assume that both factors would cause interest in femslash to grow, but it hasn't.

Supply and Demand: A Reader's Perspective

The data for readers shows the exact opposite: Femslash is not the least popular genre for readers (that would be het), and interest in femslash has grown among readers since 2015. A lot.

The graphs above show the responses of participants to the four survey items, "I enjoy reading [x] stories," where as above, [x] is replaced by the genre.

As stated in Note 1 below, the 2015 survey did not define the terms femslash, genfic, het, and slash, so at least some of the increase may be due to readers understanding better what the item was asking them to respond to. Regardless, 60% of readers in the 2020 survey agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, "I enjoy reading femslash stories," a 13% increase from the same item in 2015.⁴

The phenomenon here—that there is more interest among readers for femslash than among authors—is not new. It was true in the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey as well, and in 2013, CentrumLumina documented the same in her AO3 Census: She found four times as many femslash readers as she did creators. The economics of supply and demand do not, of course, apply tidily here, but the survey data certainly suggests that there is interest in femslash among readers.

Portrait of the Femslash Author

Because the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey collects a variety of demographic data, it is interesting to see if and how responses to specific survey items vary based on demographic variables. I found trends based on both participant gender and age on the item that asked about identifying as a femslash writer.

First, in both 2015 and 2020, nonbinary authors are the most likely to write femslash, identifying as femslash authors 21% of the time in the 2020 data. In comparison, women identify as femslash authors 14% of the time and men 10% of the time. Even more dramatic are the data for authors who chose Disagree or Strongly Disagree for this item: 73% and 71% among women and men, respectively, but only 55% of nonbinary authors. Therefore, not only do nonbinary authors identify more often as femslash writers, they are far less likely to see this identity as something that doesn't fit them at all, which could mean that even among the nonbinary authors who didn't identify as femslash writers, they are more likely to write or consider writing femslash.

The participant's age also predicts whether or not they identify as a femslash author, with younger authors more likely to write femslash than older authors. These findings were likewise true in 2015.

These data are not terribly surprising. I am part of the last age group before femslash writing drops below the double digits; I was in my late 30s when the 2020 survey was released. I was an adult when concerted efforts around marriage equality and other civil rights for LGBTQIA+ people became part of the mainstream political discourse in many Western nations. I was also part of the fandom in an era that was often hostile towards writing slash and writing about women; as I noted above, femslash was essentially nonexistent compared to the other genres during this time. It was possible to curate a fanfiction reading experience, as a Tolkien fan, that didn't include even the faintest hint of LGBTQIA+ content. "Shipping" wasn't even a term used or recognized in much of Tolkien fanfiction fandom.

Younger authors, on the other hand, know a fandom where shipping diverse pairings is constantly visible in their fandom spaces. Consolidation from small mailing lists and communities—and the archives that served them—onto larger panfandom platforms like the Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Tumblr means that readers are far less likely to be able to wall themselves off entirely from certain genres. And they're less likely to want to, having grown up in a political and social climate that is far more accepting of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.

Femslash Is Political

And writing femslash is a political act for some writers.

In July 2021, I presented about representation in fanfiction at the Tolkien Society Seminar on "Tolkien and Diversity." As I began to crunch survey data to put together this presentation, I expected that authors would create fanfiction about characters that reflect their own identities more often than would authors who didn't share that connection. In other words, I thought I'd see women writing more about women; Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) writing more about BIPOC characters; and fans who identified as queer writing more slash and femslash.

It turns out it was more complicated than that. In some instances, this was true: that nonbinary authors are the most enthusiastic writers of femslash is an example of that. But it wasn't always true. Instead, a much better predictor was an author's perception of marginalization.⁵ If an author identified as a member of a marginalized group—meaning the author was part of that group and felt marginalized based on that identity—they were more likely to write about characters who were also a member of that group.

Authors who self-identified as marginalized based on their gender and/or sexual orientation are far more likely to also identify as femslash authors. This is even more true for authors who identified as marginalized based on both gender and sexual orientation; 26% of these participants identified as femslash authors. (Among those marginalized based on gender but not sexual orientation, the number was 21%; among those marginalized based on sexual orientation but not gender, it is 23%—not significantly different but still an interesting trend in the context of the broader pattern.)

However, perhaps it was the experience of marginalization—any marginalization, not just that based on gender and sexual orientation—that led authors to write femslash, a kind of affinity with any character who might be pushed to the fringes of society because of their identity. To test this possibility, I looked at authors who reported some form of marginalization other than gender or sexual orientation and compared them to authors who did not report any marginalization at all. These two groups wrote femslash at roughly the same rates: about 5% of them identified as femslash authors.

Femslash authors, therefore, appear to be writing their stories at least in part to see their experiences and characters like them represented on the page, especially amidst a canon that shows little welcome to either female or queer identities. This may help to explain how femslash went from essentially nonexistent in the Tolkien fandom to—while still the least popular among authors—a genre enjoyed by a majority of readers, centered as the focus of its own events, and increasingly not a genre non grata.

Notes

1. Note that, in 2020, Maria and I included a short definition of each of the four genres on the survey items for both readers and writers. These definitions were not included in the 2015 results and may impact the data somewhat. For example, the 2020 dataset generally showed a lower number of No Opinion/Not Sure responses to these items, which is quite possibly due to fans not knowing the definitions of terms that, by this time, had faded from near-universal use.
2. Because, out of the entire survey, I've fielded questions or feedback most often on this particular set of items, the choice of wording in these items is intentional—specifically the word identify. The statement "I write femslash" would capture a lot of participants who have indeed written femslash for fannish events and social occasions. For example, a fan might write a femslash story for an exchange or as a gift to a friend, but it may not be a genre that this author would choose to write outside of social occasions. What this item seeks to identify are the authors who do choose to write femslash and embrace this genre as part of their creative fannish identity.
3. Slash writers also saw a similar small drop, from 47% to 43% agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement. Het writers saw a more dramatic drop: 29% to 21% agreeing or strongly agreeing. Only genfic grew as an identity, from 39% in 2015 to 43% in 2020. This may be due to the increased clarity provided in the survey about what these terms actually mean (see Note 1) or may show a decrease in the importance of genre in the Tolkienfic fandom … or may be due to something else entirely, or even nothing at all. The speculation is both the fun and peril of quantitative data.
4. The No Opinion/Not Sure response option would presumably have captured those readers in 2015 who didn't know what the term femslash meant. In 2020, 21% of readers chose this option. It dropped in 2020 to 15% of readers. What this shows is that this response wasn't chosen only by people who didn't understand the term in 2015, suggesting that at least some of the increase in the number of readers who agreed that they enjoy reading femslash was driven by actual interest.
5. This survey item was written as follows: "Do you identify as part of a marginalized group? Check all that apply." Participants were provided with a list of choices, as well as an "Other" field that allowed for an open response. Maria and I included this item after deciding to expand the demographic data collected in the 2020 survey. Because we are both researchers located in the United States, as we collected feedback on the new demographic survey items—particularly those related to race and ethnicity—it quickly became clear to us that we could not easily remove that lens from our perception of the survey items, and we realized that we risked either drawing conclusions about fans that they themselves would not wish to be drawn or missing fans who perceive marginalization not readily apparent to us in the U.S.