Female friendships.
sinesofinsanity prompted me to write on this, and since she's a genfic person I went looking for stuff to rec her.
I didn't find a lot of female friendship fanworks when I went looking through my bookmarks. Part of this has to do with how female friendships are represented in the media. Too often there is no female character at all. Sometimes there is one female character. Female friendship doesn't get depicted where women do not exist. We live in a world where the Bechdel, or Bechdel-Wallace Test exists, where two women existing, talking to each other, about something other than a man, is actually remarkable.
I have a lot of fanworks bookmarked that have their focus on a single woman, or are femslash. When I went looking for more fanworks - since sines is a gen-reader and clearly interested in this theme - I ran across a lot that straddled a place between friendship and femslash, where you could choose not to view something through a queer lens. There was stuff about Xena and Gabrielle in that pile, and while those two do have a great and epic friendship they also have a great and epic queer subtext acknowledged by their actresses. While I personally feel like friendship is an important part of a romantic or sexual relationship, and that there's a richness and complexity to those relationships, there's also a richness and complexity to friendship full-stop and grouping people like Xena and Gabrielle in a list of examples of female friendship feels a whole lot like queer erasure. So, when I reference fanworks in this I am leaving the femslashy out.
One of the films I want to talk about is The First Wives Club - Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Diane Keaton. It's a comedy that came out in 1996 about a group of college friends reuniting years later after the death of their friend. Once they sit down and really talk to each other they realise that for all that they took very different paths their lives have some striking similarities, and they're at a similar place in their lives. Each of them is in a place where society no longer considers them beautiful (because we all know that female beauty has a best before date*), and they're separating from their husbands. People write about how romantic relationships can destroy friendships, not in a big and dramatic way, but because you prioritise and devote so much time to one relationship you lose others. The women in the films lose their romantic relationships, rekindle their friendship, and face down the world. They look out for other women.
I feel like female friendship can be tied up in that support, that it can have a lot to do with that - feminism and the patriarchy and so on. I think that the friendships that we have with each other, not just women as depicted in the media but ourselves in our day to day lives, are part of that larger culture that we all exist in. The friendships women have with each other are response and reaction to their culture; our friendships are part of our culture.
thingswithwings has a vid about women in comedy and female friendship, and she created the vid with an awareness of that larger context, which she touches on a bit in her notes, and also as a celebration of these women:
OK by
thingswithwings
Community/Parks and Recreation/multifandom | 4:03 | Song: "OK" by Holly Conlan
Summary: Here's the thing about comedy.
It's great and I really love it. It's a vid about women in comedy, when we are so often told that women aren't funny (that we're not worth listening to), and all these things that these women in comedy are and are to each other, and it is, yeah, a great friendship vid.
So is this next vid:
Come 'Round for Tea by
garrideb
Marvel Comics | 2:03 | Song: "Baltic Sea" by The Social Services (edited)
Summary: A celebration of female friendship in Marvel comics, because even super-heroines need friends!
I am in love with what
garrideb did with the text bubbles in this. It is one of the best comics vids I have ever seen because of it. It also captures a lot of how I feel about female friendship in my own life, including the hearts on everything; I love my friends. I love how this vid is just one giant yep, tea, conversation, friends, friends, friends. They are so important.
I think representing female friendship means so much, because we do get told that we're not important and oftentimes when two women are represented it's in the context of being each other's competition, which is awful and so damaging. I have so much affection for every woman who's just like, nope, not doing it. Sisters. We are best as allies, all of us, men included. Friendship and understanding and taking care of each other is so important.
Dark Angel was so great for that with Max and Original Cindy.
(untitled Original Cindy & Max gifset) by
besidethewall
Dark Angel | Original Cindy & Max Guevara | 5 gifs
I love their relationship so much and Original Cindy is such an amazing human being and she is so incredibly solidly, beautifully, in Max's corner. It's fantastic. Trish Walker in Jessica Jones is the same. She is very much given the opportunity to walk away from a messy situation and so completely does not take it; she fights to stay in her best friend's life.
(untitled Trish Walker & Jessica Jones gifset) by
jessica-jones
Jessica Jones | Trish Walker & Jessica Jones | 8 gifs
It’s by far the most complex and interesting and special friendship between two women that I’ve seen in a movie or television. - Krysten Ritter
I love how real those two are. I don't really have words for all of that. I like Jessica Jones a lot, I feel like it is a solidly good thing, especially in its representation of women.
The Bletchley Circle is another name that I'm going to toss out whenever someone mentions wanting to watch something with women in it; it's so good. Ladies doing math together in post-war Britain to solve crime, basically, and all of this really fascinating social stuff embedded in that. All four of them are pretty different people who worked together as code-breakers during the war and their relationships are really great.
If you're into the women detecting things there's also The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Rosemary & Thyme, I mean, since we've a theme going now. In the first a woman opens her own detective agency in Botswana. She hires an adorable assistant and they drink a lot of tea and she takes a bunch of cases. In the second two women gardeners team up and garden around Britain together, mostly shamelessly pursuing any chance whatsoever to solve crimes; they are on the case, will find their man, and also get your roses sorted out.
The Middleman is also a series I've been reccing people recently, that's mostly pretty light-hearted and features a solid female friendship, as exhibited here:
Afterlife by
sanguinity
The Middleman | 3:23 | Song: "Afterlife" by Ingrid Michaelson
Summary: Art school was simple; real life is scary.
That vid does such a good job of showing women being there for each other and encouraging each other; it's really great. One of this year's yuletide stories does a stellar job of that, too:
Going Dark by
killer_quean and
Ruby_Powell
Slings & Arrows | PG-13 | 2,206 words
Summary: Maria's personal notes from the production of DIEFENBAKER! A Canadian Musical, by Darren Nichols and Richard Smith-Jones.
It is a hysterical epistolary fic, set post-canon with Maria in the shit show that is Richard Smith-Jones and Darren Nichols' New Burbage Festival, drinking heavily and increasingly fed up with their crap.
...weirdly the next fic I want to rec also includes livestock:
Cheating the Other Guy by sholio
Stargate: Atlantis | PG | 2,000 words
Summary: Sam and Teyla find themselves in a Western. Sort of. And Teyla seems to have accidentally sold her teammates to buy a ranch, but who can blame her.
It's got a kind of similar sentiment behind it to Going Dark. It is mostly Sam and Teyla hanging out on a ranch; it's pretty great.
The community that that fic was written for has a hilarious name, kinda - galpalficathon - if they were running that today it would be, like, femslashers ficcing kinda angrily, OH REALLY THEY ARE MARRIED TO EACH OTHER AND YOU ARE CALLING THEM GALPALS, SHOVE YOUR JUVENILE SLEEP-OVER FANTASY UP YOUR ASS AND STOP FUCKING ERASING QUEERS. (See a previous paragraph about the lack of femslash in this entry.) The associations with that phrase have changed a fair bit over the years, I think.
Last Cinderella is a romcom that's pretty ridiculous, and so tropey. It's about three women in their late 30s finding romance or sorting out their lives/love lives. It focuses on Sakura and there's this whole love triangle with her and two men and blah blah blah hetero romance plot I found compelling because of kinks. Her friendship with these two women is really important in her life, and they sort of remind me of the women in Sex and the City, which pretty much matches the plot description of Last Cinderella, except for a couple tweaks, actually. Both shows have some solid female friendship things in them that I really like, women sitting around together and talking and drinking and eating. I feel that's so important.
Representation is so important, and sometimes where that isn't so much people who write women together will write women who never had any screen-time together:
Dexterity by
leupagus,
screamlet,
waldorph
Star Trek | PG-13 | 7,910 words
Summary: Detailing one of Amanda Grayson's first diplomatic assignments, which happens to be on the USS Kelvin.
Winona Kirk is one of my favourite things to come out of a fandom and I love the relationship that she and Amanda strike up in this fic; it's them kicking ass, basically, as Winona swears and fucks people liberally and Amanda really handles a diplomatic situation. I love how different they are on the surface and how in sync they are about getting stuff done.
Ladies working together is one of my favourite things. Women helping each other is great.
I feel like I've been rambling with this for a while and have mostly said what I have intended to. This is slightly off-topic, but if you've made it this far, you might also be interested to know that there's a recent attempt to start up a kind of genfic hub on tumblr - you can read a bit about it here. It looks interesting, in some ways I like, and some I don't, but I feel like gen fic recs are few and far between, so it looks like it could be a pretty good thing. ...and yep, that's all I got, or maybe more accurately, this is as long as I am willing to make this entry.
sinesofinsanity: ♥
*I recommend reading Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth
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