At its worst, it supports the idea that lesbian leads to death.
I've read f/f slash for Western media sources, and a handful for anime/manga fandoms. From what I've seen, death!fic is pretty rare, unless it's based on a canon heavily weighted towards doom and gloom. I've also seen fic that retroactively femslashed characters where one was already dead in canon. But those were more outlier cases. I think lesbian death happens more in original media sources; at least the U.S. ones. Japanese media tends to portray f/f (yuri) as a passing phase, and how het is the only "real" type of relationship.
At it's best, femmeslash gives even more screen time and attention to the ladies and allows authors to explore issues that might feel unnatural or out of character for a male character to be party to.
I'd say that from a feminist perspective, the best thing about femslash could be that it explores relationships between female characters. Male characters just end up getting marginalized.
And I actually think that m/m slash and f/f slash overlap in how they're both removed from heteronormativity, and written primarily by women (http://community.livejournal.com/girlwank/3704.html). They have that in common, but m/m and f/f do operate differently. M/m slash and het can put the female gaze on men, which is the opposite of how it usually works in the mainstream. Het and f/f slash can be about women writing about female characters.
no subject
I've read f/f slash for Western media sources, and a handful for anime/manga fandoms. From what I've seen, death!fic is pretty rare, unless it's based on a canon heavily weighted towards doom and gloom. I've also seen fic that retroactively femslashed characters where one was already dead in canon. But those were more outlier cases. I think lesbian death happens more in original media sources; at least the U.S. ones. Japanese media tends to portray f/f (yuri) as a passing phase, and how het is the only "real" type of relationship.
At it's best, femmeslash gives even more screen time and attention to the ladies and allows authors to explore issues that might feel unnatural or out of character for a male character to be party to.
I'd say that from a feminist perspective, the best thing about femslash could be that it explores relationships between female characters. Male characters just end up getting marginalized.
And I actually think that m/m slash and f/f slash overlap in how they're both removed from heteronormativity, and written primarily by women (http://community.livejournal.com/girlwank/3704.html). They have that in common, but m/m and f/f do operate differently. M/m slash and het can put the female gaze on men, which is the opposite of how it usually works in the mainstream. Het and f/f slash can be about women writing about female characters.