An archive of our own: the beauty of sapphic fandoms
Sapphic fandoms aren’t perfect by any means, but they are a unique community that has the potential to offer all queer women a playground full of possibilities.
“Two bodies completely overrun by touch”.
This is how Emma D’Arcy described an impulsive, passionate kiss between Emma D’Arcy’s and Sonoya Mizuno’s characters, Rhaenyra and Mysaria. This ground-shifting moment took place, semi-unexpectedly, during the new season of House of the Dragon season 2.
So my sincere congratulations to all the promoters of the lesbian Rhaenyra agenda! You’ve been here a while. This isn’t, by far, the first instant of lesbianism imposed upon HOTD, even if it is the most explicit one.
If you, like me, were an Online Lesbian in 2022, you don’t need to have watched either of the popular HBO shows to remember the following exchange between HOTD stars Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke: when asked what’s their drink of choice by Cooke, D’Arcy replies with the stylish answer “Negroni…Sbagliato…with Prosecco in it,” the tension-building description of the drink punctuated by Cooke’s enthusiastic exclamations, which conclude with the unforgettable, lavishly impressed, “Oh, stunning.”
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The exchange became not only a meme (because of course it did), but knowledge of it became a way to signal to others that you are, in fact, a queer woman and you are, in fact, online. So much so that in season 2 of hit Australian comedy Colin From Accounts, episode 4 includes Megan’s (Emma Harvie) new girlfriend (played by a brilliantly satirical Virginia Gay) referencing D’Arcy’s drink of choice when ordering drinks for the table on a disastrous double date with protagonists Ashley and Gordon (show-creators Harriet Dyer and Patrick Barmmall, respectively): “Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it? Yes!” declares Gay’s character while looking at the menu. “Need, need, need.”
D’Arcy and Cooke don’t seem to speak to lesbians only in their interviews though (even if another joint interview where they talk about their friendship in homoerotic terms of domination and submission recently became popular). House of the Dragon fans have been reading sapphic tension into the relationship between Rheanyra (D’Arcy) and Alicent (Cooke) since the beginning of the show, their portrayal of intense friendship veering into recognisable signs of queer desire for those who have the right goggles on.
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And now the lesbians are, as the kids say, winning.
This isn’t, of course, the first and only fanbase to have enacted a queer reading upon its source material to create a community around that reading. In fact, this experience that people have with HOTD speaks to something that’s ingrained into online sapphic spaces (and, let’s be real, offline ones as well): sometimes, what we need as queer women to form a strong community together is something to understand each other through.
Something that speaks to us enough to understand ourselves through.
And sometimes, that something is a piece of media.
It’s fun to be a dyke
“Do you ever think,” my girlfriend often says, “how we wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for a stupid movie?” She’s talking about Ocean’s 8, the 2018 installation of the Ocean’s saga starring Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, and many more names brought together to rob the Met Gala and prove to George Clooney and his gang that women can be just as cool as them.
She’s right. Five years into our relationship, the fact we lucked-out with each other is still undeniable. Coming from different countries, from different backgrounds, born at different years and never sharing the same online space before 2018, there was no reason for us to begin talking to each other except our mutual interest in this film.
This isn’t an unusual occurrence, by far. Shared interests have always been a tenet of dating—any form of dating—and inter-fandom dating is perhaps as old a tradition as fandom itself. A recent Reddit thread asks “If you met your partner through fandom…how?”, with many personal stories unfolding in the comments, and in 2019 The Daily Dot published a piece about “Real-life love stories from the heart of fandom”. Is it truly surprising that a hobby focused on community will generate love stories through the ages?
But it isn’t just love stories that fandom cultivates. While interviewing people to gather different experiences within sapphic fandoms for this piece, a common thread was bringing up this sense of commonality that leads to unique bonds: when I ask for a memory that stands out through their time in sapphic fandoms, most people talk about friendships. They talk about meeting people who became dear to them in unexpected ways, who they feel have made their lives better; some talk about the sense of community brought forth but a wave of enthusiastic people creating together in concentrated events such as fic exchange, and the joy of getting to be a part of that.
Meagan, who’s been active in sapphic fandoms since she was 12 and is now 37, tells me about an SNL fridge magnet that was sent to her by a fandom friend she met on her first trip to New York—they lost touch, but the magnet remains, and so does the memory. Riberio also traveled to a different city to meet a fandom friend, as a teen, and feels lucky she got to do it. She describes the occasion as a “really special moment of connection”. Chainofclovers (some interviewees asked to be referred to with pseudonyms or anonymously) shares with me the memory of traveling to a fandom friend’s wedding, where the happy couple also met through fandom before getting married. She explains that these two people are really close friends of her and her partner in their “three-dimensional life”.
“I think fandom is what has helped me reframe stuff that happens online as part of real life,” she elaborates on her choice of words. Instead of referring to life offline as IRL (in real life), while life online remains “fake”, chainofclovers makes a conscious attempt to illuminate the significance of online communities to people in her use of language. It seems that sapphic fandoms in particular have a tendency to help people reframe their view on life and themselves.
“Sapphic fandom has made it much easier to de-centre cishet white male perspectives on life as a whole and all that entails,” shares Flint, whose entry point to sapphic fandoms was Sailor Moon, and who also shares that their involvement in sapphic fandoms have played a role in their exploration and discovery of their identification with the ace spectrum and their gender identity.
Sapphic fandoms were “a really great way to become friends with more lesbians,” says one person who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s fun to be a dyke!” they add, and explain that sapphic fandoms have made them more confident to call themselves a dyke and be open about the things they like. Meanwhile, Brooke, who’s been involved in sapphic subsets of the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson fandoms since she was 12, reveals that sapphic fandoms are what made her realise that two women can have sex, even though she already knew they could be in love.
It’s not just the comfort and safety of anonymity, which is an important aspect of any queer community’s ability to offer a space for its people, that enables this exploration and discovery for members of sapphic fandoms. It’s also the undeniable presence of creativity—a kind of creativity that isn’t pressured by commercial needs, that could, potentially, be as experimental as it wants, as flawed as it wants, as self-indulgent as it wants—that encourages people to go beyond the familiar. To learn who they could be, or might really be, and to go beyond their taught ways into the unknown.
“It is a relief to engage with a queer community built around fluidity and fantasy,” says another anonymous interviewee to me.
And yet, sapphic fandoms are still undeniably centered around whiteness. Out of the most popular 100 sapphic ships (relationships) on AO3, 120 characters are white. 60 characters are divided between different racial identities, with 6 remaining characters defined as racially ambiguous and 15 as non-human (and those numbers are without mentioning that some characters from other planets in fantasy books, who are indigenous to their planet, were defined as Indigenous for the purpose of that survey, and other such misleading definitions). The vast majority of these characters of color are in a relationship with a white person. There is a racism issue within fandom in general that fans of colour continuously attempt to discuss, and it does not pass over sapphic fandoms.
It is, in fact, part of the question of sapphic fandoms: when we are recentering the margins, whose stories get to be recentered?
No archive
Carmen Maria Machado opens her memoir, In The Dream House, with an indictment of the archive. “Sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories,” she writes, referring to Saidiya Hartman’s writing on accounts of slavery.
Machado’s focus is on our collective archive, or lack thereof, of queerness —specifically, the history of queer abuse and the silence on the subject that its exclusion from the archive promotes. But in making a point about the ways queerness is excluded from our collective histories (queerness is sometimes never committed to the archive, sometimes it is deliberately destroyed, sometimes the gatekeepers prevent it from being considered), Machado also makes a point about recreating these histories. About inserting ourselves into them, putting ourselves, and others, “into necessary context”.
“I speak into the silence,” she concludes the chapter titled Dream House as Prologue. “I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”
As queer women, we have practiced listening for this small sound our whole lives. Being relegated to the margins of thought and culture requires a careful ear—to be able to locate yourself, and to be able to locate others like yourself, you must hear the unhearable. Living through signals, through the marginalia of letters, of queer readings of stories noted in their margin notes. But what if we didn’t measure just the emptiness of the archive by the small sound that the stone of our story makes in its vast crevice, rather also noticed its untold fullness by the reverberations that this small sound creates as it reflects off the people it reaches?
In talking about the memory of receiving an “effusive” comment on a Blue and Yellow Diamond fanfic (from Steven Universe), Margaret shares that the person asked if they could print the fanfic to have with them wherever they were. It made Margaret, 19 at the time, realize that, “I wasn't just writing for myself. I wasn't writing in a meaningless and empty vacuum.”
This is what communities enable, in general—the accumulation of small sounds so we may know this world is not empty of us—but more specific to my interests in this piece, this is what sapphic fandoms practice. Tossing our stones, listening for their small sounds, and locating the instances of reverberation to come together with others and recreate our history together. Make, well, an archive of our own.
Quite literally, as Archive of Our Own is the name of a popular website that hosts fandom works, run by a non-profit called The Organization for Transformative Works, which aims to—fittingly—create an archive of fandom works to protect, preserve, and cultivate fandom culture. Fandom sits at the unique intersection of intentional online spaces, such as dating apps, which assume the mutual interest people on the app share in meeting others for a dedicated purpose, and connections that are built through chance encounters—a feat usually reserved for offline communities. You come into the space looking for people who might share your enthusiasm, but you never know where a random comment on a work of fanfiction hosted on AO3 (Archive of Our Own) could take you.
Transformational fandoms, in particular—and by that I mean fandoms that show their love for the source material through creative participation, generating new artistic outputs based on the “canon”—are rife with the sense of (or rather, need for) intentional community-building, as fans reach out to each other to sustain their creative participation and share their enthusiasm about each other’s works.
Still, sapphic fandoms are relatively a small part of the larger fandom community. According to more statistics collected from AO3 in 2023, you’d have to go beyond the top ten most popular “ships” (relationships) to locate a sapphic ship, and out of the top 100 most popular ships, only 8 are sapphic. Even within a space of unbridled creativity, sapphic identity remains on the margins. But that doesn’t negate the importance of sapphic fandoms, and perhaps it is even a characteristic of them which helps people find joy in them. In transformational fandom fashion, sapphic fandoms foster communities which are oriented towards queer women—our experiences, our stories, our needs. Perhaps it is this marginality that helps these spaces be so personal to queer women.
Jet, who is mostly involved in The Locked Tomb fandom, but whose introduction to fandom was through non-sapphic fandoms, describes her exposure to sapphic media as something that felt “personally curated in a way I didn't expect.” For Brooke, this goes even deeper, as she describes her feelings of alienation from a lot of the representation lesbians got in popular media, and says that, “sapphic fanart and fanfiction just felt natural.” An insight into “actual queer people”.
Thinking back to the issue of racial representation within fandom, though, the lack of diversity becomes even more acute when our communities are so small and personal. It poses the question: if sapphic fandoms are a space curated towards queer women, full of unpressured creativity, why are we not then able to make it into a space that takes into account, and is tailored towards, all queer women?
Maybe we can, if we’d intend to do so.
A translation
In The Celluloid Closet, the iconic 1995 documentary examining the history of queer representation in Hollywood, Harvey Feinstein says something that has stuck with me since I first watched the film over a decade ago:
“Every time I watched a straight scene I had to do this massive translation for myself. Then I did Torch Song Trilogy. I get these straight people saying to me 'you know, it's not really gay, it's universal'. I say 'up yours, it's gay'. That you can take it and apply it to yourself is wonderful, but at last I don't have to do the translating, you do.”
At last I don’t have to do the translating. Translation is a linguistic act, a cultural act, a physiological act; and though we tend to think of translation as a singular, momentary occurrence—the translation of literary works, the translation of references in a joke, the translation of neurological signals into bodily actions—translation is also a daily experience. We are constantly translating ourselves to others, and others to ourselves. One might argue that all communication involves translation.
In the context of representation, to make the act of translation visible is to make clear the insertion of ourselves into the gap between a narrative and its reading. Anne Carson describes the translator as “someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow.” Someone conscious of the original text—a solid body—and its potential meanings in a different language—a shifting shadow. Someone conscious of their own solid body changing a shifting shadow, of their own role in turning a solid body into a shifting shadow. This consciousness is crucial to the work of the translator, without it there would be no translation.
Harvey Feinstein’s insistence that his work is not universal but requires translation by some audiences is an insistence on maintaining this consciousness—a consciousness that marginalized audiences are used to having. This story, we are used to being told, is not for you, nor about you—but it is the story you have to work with. Our awareness of this act of translation is crucial to our ability to tell diverse stories: the need for translation is not to the detriment of a story, it is an inherent part of our ability to tell it.
Though representation has significantly increased, and has been significantly diversified, since 1995, as queer audiences, we still do a whole lot of translation. In GLAAD’s annual report on LGBTQ+ representation in TV for the 2023-2024 season, the organization found that across all platforms, there was a consistent decrease in the overall number of LGBTQ+ characters, before even considering the diversity of these characters in terms of sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and disability. What more, shows are often being canceled and LGBTQ+ characters are still being killed off or end up leaving the show, compromising the stability and longevity of our representation. The report might be specific to the United States, but in typical fashion to US culture, its findings are felt all over the world.
Perhaps the most beautiful part of sapphic fandoms is that this translation becomes a communal act, one that we take joy in. Shadows multiplying, changing shapes, solid bodies morphed into a bridge between lines.
Almost exclusively, throughout the answers people gave to me, a preference for writing about characters and ships who aren’t “canonically” (as in, explicitly within the text) queer emerged. Even for people who declared no preference one way or the other, like purlturtle, the most important thing in being drawn to a ship is “whether the characters have chemistry and a connection with each other,” rather than whether or not they are declared queer.
thereweresunflowers, who is involved in a sapphic subset of the Supernatural fandom (called, fittingly, Sapphicnatural), tells me that part of the appeal of the fandom is its ability to build on female characters who get less attention within the canon of the show, or even are mistreated and miswritten—a sort of reclamation of the potential these characters present. The general vibe, she explains, is “stick these two women together and find out.” For many in sapphic fandoms, as perfectlyloudbouquet2 explains to me, “canon is just the starting point.”
This is a familiar practice of sapphic writing and writing about sapphics. “Historical accuracy and rigor had only excluded us from the narrative,” writes Amelia Possanza in the introduction to her book, Lesbian Love Story, which tells seven lesbian love stories from the archives, often adding imagined moments to the often limited, often dry material that Possanza had available in her research. “Imagination and invention are often the only tools left to create something more than a dry story from the fragmented record, to breathe life into characters who must have loved and felt deeply.”
Sapphic fandoms aren’t perfect by any means, but they are a unique community that has the potential to offer all queer women a playground full of possibilities. They fandoms reflect a necessary reclamation of space for queer women—physical space, by existing proudly, and mental space, by thinking and talking about our existence—in our insistence that the margins we are offered could actually be the whole story, and more.
Michael Elias is a Jewish, multidisciplinary writer focusing on queer culture. Their writing has appeared in Xtra Magazine, Into, harana poetry, and elsewhere.
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