Saffic
From Fan History Wiki
Slash. Saffic. Femslash. f/f. Alternative. Femmeslash. Sapphic. f/f slash. Yuri. Shoujo ai. Uber. Girlslash. Lesbianfic. Fandom has given many names to a subset of fan fiction featuring two women involved in a romantic or sexual relationship. At the present, there are many strong and thriving communities featuring members reading and writing this material. The community has had several authors emerge as professional authors, helped to get there by their fannish experience. Saffic has helped many women explore their own sexuality, become more comfortable with it and provided a welcome community for lesbians. The community has created their own, distinct fan fiction communities, behavior codes, traditions, definitions and terminology. The community, unlike other parts of the greater fan fiction community, lacks a strong zine backing and as of February 2006, there has been no multifandom saffic convention. Still, things have come a long way.
In the modern fan fiction culture, loosely defined in this case as the fandoms which emerged from the science fiction traditions of the 1950s and 1960s, saffic is both old and new. The first saffic to arrive probably hit fandom in the mid to late 1970s. At that time, the material did not have a name as the term slash would not arrive for another ten years or so. One of the first known instance of saffic in the modern fan fiction context was the story “Kismet,” by Dani Morin. This story was published in 1977’s Star Trek Obsc’Zine #2. It is assumed that a few more stories were floating around, possibly as drawerfic. More saffic would emerge but it would take the Blake’s 7 fandom to bring attention to the material. This would not happen until the mid-1980s, despite the fact that Blake’s 7 had first started airing in 1978. Some of the members of this small Blake’s 7 saffic community included Jane Carnell, Barbara Tennison, M.J. Dolan, and Bryn Lantry. As fannish terminology began to take shape, develop and gain universal fannish meaning, these female/female stories began to generally be called f/f slash.
According to people who were members of the community at that time, slash was generally viewed with some scorn and fear born out of homophobic attitudes and a desire not to have their material cracked down upon by the powers that be. Some segments of the broader fandom were already feeling that wrath with incidents such as the one occurring in the Star Wars fandom. There were other fandoms where members who were homosexual were being threatened with outing by their fellow fen. There were people who were threatening to contact employers if people wrote homosexual fan fiction. For the small f/f community, the problem was worse. The material was held taboo in places where m/m was acceptable.
During this same period of the mid to late 1980s, some fandoms began to move on-line. This was in correlation to the growth of university networks, Usenet and mailing lists. There were also some fandom people, specifically in the Anime and Star Trek fandoms, who were big into pushing this new medium as a place for fannish discourse. They did such things as give demonstrations at conventions and write about it in zines.
The saffic part of the fan fiction community was a relatively late bloomer. The gen and het fen had gotten on-line first. The m/m slash fen were close behind on their heels in establishing their communities. They posted to Usenet and created their own mailing lists. The comic book fandom had their mailing lists as early as 1984, with the Superguy mailing list. Star Trek fen were on Usenet. By the early 1990s, Blake’s 7, Doctor Who, Highlander, Quantum Leap communities all had mailing lists. If you know where to look, you can find these early postings still on the Internet today. What is noticeably absent are the references to f/f, the f/f communities. Evidence suggests that the earliest references to f/f on the Internet happened in the Blake’s 7 fandom, on their mailing in 1994. The references to this material referred to it as f/f slash. The references were related to a question of does this material exist, if so where and if not, why not? The discussion said there was some on the Blake’s 7 fandom but it was rare and it was generally not on-line. The lack of material was attributed to the absence of men in the fandom.
The saffic communities that were developing at this period were generally separate from eastern fandoms. Anime fen were in their own separate space, with their own terminology and fannish practices. What was happening in Japanese based during this period of the 1980s and early to mid1990s is relatively unknown. By 1995, the f/f contingent was defined enough that Yuri was the term of choice for the saffic equivalent in that culture. This term is still in use, and has reached a point where it often refers to explicitly sexual fic, whereas the term shoujoai tends to apply to more romantic fic. Both terms are still actively in use in the anime fandom.
By 1996, a number of factors seemed to have come together and saffic became more visible on a panfannish level. The material was beginning to show up at conventions such as Media West, helping to expose it to a larger audience. America On-line made accessibility more readily available. CompuServe and Prodigy were offering access to the World Wide Web. In this year, the first X-Files saffic, still being called f/f slash or female-female slash, was published on the Internet. Other communities publishing early saffic that year on-line included Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Doctor Who and Xena: The Warrior Princess. The latter would start to change the nature and shape of saffic this year, when they introduced a word for their saffic writings. Instead of calling it f/f slash or female-female slash, they called the material Alternative. This term would be the defining one for the material in several fandoms for the next three to four years.
Other fandoms would begin to join in, developing small saffic contingents. They were helped by a variety of factors. In the case of ER, in 1997, the canon relationship between Kerry Weaver and Kim Legaspi helped to develop that community. The Xena: Warrior Princess community was helped by the large lesbian audience for the show, being a show that focused almost solely on the relationship between two women and the large influx of people from other older, more established fandoms. By 1997, this community had begin archiving their material on websites. Some of these archives contained only saffic material. The Xena: Warrior Princess] community would also coin the term Uber this year by Kim Taborn of Whoosh.org. She noted on Whoosh that the sudden emergence of Ubers started in 1997, after the Xena episode "The Xena Scrolls" aired. This episode was set in 1942 and featured the characters portraying respective characters' descendants. This tradition would eventually lead to some authors in the fan fiction community turning professional and helping to push published lesbian fiction as a major component of several saffic communities.
As Xena: The Warrior Princess took off, Sailor Moon’s saffic period rose as the other large community of the day. This fandom attracted many American fen, ones who were not steeped in eastern, Japanese fannish cultural practices. It helped to create other saffic audience for other Anime shows which would become big in the United States, shows such as Card Captor Sakura and Revolutionary Girl Utena. These audiences would begin crossing over with western fandoms, helping to change both cultures.
By 1998 and 1999, the saffic community became bigger as more fandoms started joining in. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5, Roswell, X-Files had small communities with participants actively plugging their material and relationships. The community also faced a terminology shift as women like Kate Bolin started using terms like femslash, females and saffic. These communities were aided by the ability to quickly, easily and cheaply create mailing lists. A number of them were started in 1999. A lot of them related to Star Trek and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. In moving their material to mailing lists, they were one of the many factors pushing the centralization of both fandoms away from Usenet and in to new mediums.
These fandoms attracted bigger audiences, and in some regards, defined those fandoms. Xena and Buffy were the saffic fandoms. Yes, the fandoms did other things, had other pairings but they were the place for saffic and they were the communities to find lesbians writing lesbian fic. This increased visibility and defining of those communities as havens of saffic would eventually lead to media attention, the first for f/f material, in 2000 in Wired Magazine. As attention grew, more shows started and it became acceptable to write saffic material. Writers from the older fandoms were migrating to new fandoms, fandoms which had well defined female characters, fandoms which had more than one attractive and interesting female characters. Smallville, Battlestar Galatica, Harry Potter, Queen of the Swords, The L Word, Firefly quickly found themselves with their own communities.
Fandom migration was starting to become a bigger issue as new technologies, lower archiving costs, an increase in programmers, more available scripts, new services began to be offered. Fandom went from majordomo using e-mail command mailing lists to web based mailing list management to free mailing list services like YahooGroups. Fandom went from archiving stories by hand to cgi scripts to embracing archives like FanFiction.Net to going to smaller more personalized script based archives. Fandom went from personal web pages to blogs to LiveJournals. They went from image manipulation to animated gifs to audio clips to making music videos. Saffic communities went along for the ride, developing practices similar to their counter parts in other parts of the fan fiction community. They were not fully embracing zine and conventions of some parts of fandom but they were technology well in hand.
By 2004, the saffic community seemed to have found its equilibrium with the technology changes. This allowed for the continued development of individual fandoms. Authors had gone professional. In some cases, like that of Radclyffe, saffic authors went into publishing professional novels and becoming more entrenched, not in fannish culture, but GLBT culture.
Other factors outside of the saffic community began to effect the community. Real Person Fic, generally taboo, had become less taboo. While Lord of the Rings Real Person Fic had blown open the door on the material, the saffic community was less eager to embrace the material. Some of this can be attributed to the presence of the old guard in these communities. They actively discouraged this material. Their voices began to be drowned out as more and more people accepted this material. Female Real Person Slash communities began to exist. Some of it started in the Star Trek: Voyager community. Some of it was aided by women’s professional athletics like the WNBA and the professional women’s soccer league. By 2006, very few in the saffic community would speak out against this material.,
