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This term was coined from the usage of a slash mark (“/”) between the names of two same-sex characters engaged in a sexual relationship; the most popular of these pairings at the time was Kirk/Spock.

With the advent of the Internet and newsgroup technologies in the early 1990s, fan fiction experienced explosive growth, as did fandom communities in general. The X-Files, one of the first fandoms to emerge entirely on the Internet in 1993, rapidly became one of the largest fandoms after Star Trek and one of the most prolific in terms of fan fiction production. The Internet also heralded a change in the demographics of fan fiction writers.

Though precise statistics are unavailable and no sustained research appears to have been done on the makeup of online fan fiction writers, it seems clear that the average age of fan fiction writers fell once the Internet became the primary means of distributing fan fiction.

Fan fiction and its communities have long been of interest to academic researchers, with the most well-known study, Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, appearing in 1992. Early academic theorists have argued that writing and reading fan fiction is a subversive act; indeed, Jenkins stated that “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” This utopic argument has recently been complicated by an increasing convergence between mainstream or legitimate cultural producers (e.g., Hollywood studios) and grassroots fan-based creations including fan fiction and fan-made films.

Although many fans have read these academic studies on fan fiction and have quite sophisticated understandings of the power dynamics at play between fan and producer, many fans will hasten to point out that the urge to create fan fiction is rarely rooted in the desire to subvert mainstream ideologies or wrestle power from the big boys in Tinseltown. Instead, as Xena fan (and fanfic writer) Lunacy explained in a 1998 Whoosh! article on the history of Xena fan fiction, “Unrestricted by time constraints, or censors or any of the other sensibilities imposed by film or TV, fan fiction allows for a fuller exploration of characters and themes and storylines making it incredibly appealing for fans.”

One of the most widely studied forms of fan fiction—which can be categorized in innumerable ways according to each specific fandom—is slash, which has historically been mostly about male/male couples. Academic study of slash has generally concluded that it involves loving relationships between otherwise-heterosexual men, and it is a way for women to evade or reconstruct gender to their liking. However, fans have resisted this interpretation, and male/male pairings have become grittier and more violent in fandoms such as The X-Files or Angel, unlike the idealized harmony of the Kirk/Spock couple.

On the other hand, female/female slash, or femslash, has historically been quite rare. It was not until Xena: Warrior Princess, with its often quite overt subtextual homosexual relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, that the amount of femslash approached male/male slash in volume. Since Xena, other femslash pairings have included Seven of Nine/Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager; Buffy/Faith, Willow/Tara, and numerous other female/female pairings on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer; CJ and a number of female partners on The West Wing, and Olivia Benson/Alex Cabot on Law and Order: SVU, among others.

After the premiere of The L Word in 2004, femslash became much more mainstream, though some fanfic writers may question whether L Word stories about same-sex couples are actually “slash,” given that they are openly lesbian in the show itself. 

One Buffy fanfic writer, nepthys12, argued on the Kittenboard, a bulletin board for die-hard Willow/Tara fans, in 2002, “Some (including me) feel that slash is any m/m or f/f relationship, even if it's conventional in the show. To me, Willow/Tara is slash, and I have labeled it as such on my website.”

Why is it that femslash has never been as popular as male/male slash?