I remember when Rhapsody, our late and beloved moderator and a femslash fan before it was cool to be one, was the first person to request femslash in a prominent Tolkien slash exchange. It was a big deal, not because of opposition to her request, but because ... it had just never been done. Those years of slash as a prominent (if controversial) genre, and no one had requested a F/F pairing in this exchange. Femslash truly was a genre non grata: technically permitted but just not really done.

In the past several months' Cultus Dispatches columns, we've looked at how the Tolkien fandom has typically handled writing fanfiction about women. While there are multiple events encouraging fanworks about women and such fanworks are no longer rare (as I write this, half of the fanworks on the Most Recent page include women as major characters), it wasn't always this way. Writing about women was discouraged, and writing slash was discouraged too. Caught in the crosshairs of these proscriptions, femslash didn't stand much of a chance.

Thankfully, this is changing too. This month's Cultus Dispatches column looks at Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data about femslash: interest in writing it, interest in reading it, and who is creating femslash fanworks. The article continues the overall pattern of this series about writing about women: the situation still ain't great, but it's getting better. While it is still in many ways the fandom's genre non grata, growing reader interest in particular suggests it may yet take its place along slash, het, and genfic.

You can read the article Femslash Is a Political Act (and Other Observations of Tolkien Fandom's Genre Non Grata) here.