purplecat: The Tardis against a sunset (or possibly sunrise) (Doctor Who)
[personal profile] purplecat
Summary: An oddly unsatisfactory book examining the women involved with Doctor Who, both professionally, via fandom and in the murky spaces in between.

I've described this book as unsatisfactory and in a strange way I think that flows from the breath of material that it seeks to cover while at the same time drawing on a fairly tightly knit group of contributors. Ultimately neither it, nor its contributors, are clear on whether they are providing personal anecdotal accounts of their involvement with Doctor Who or whether they are providing a more scholarly (for some value of scholarly) dissection of the role of women in Doctor Who and its fandom. The anecdotal predominates and is initially interesting but ultimately the uniformity of the voices, nearly all drawn (it rapidly becomes clear) from the female attendees of one large American convention, make these stories appear rather samey and, to this British fan, rather alien.

These women remember stumbling across Doctor Who on a grainy TV set which for some reason was set to a PBS channel. They were captivated by the "Britishness" of this strange show. No one at school was familiar with Doctor Who. Watching it instantly marked them out as strange. They remember fondly the fourth Doctor and his scarf. They grow up, enter fandom, find many like-minded women there. Drift away from the show, come back for Eccleston's triumphant season, interact on LiveJournal and at ChicagoTARDIS and now watch with their partners, families and in some cases daughters. There's nothing wrong with this narrative (and all of the women have a variant on it and their own individual route through it) but it has very little in common with my own experience of Doctor Who as a traditional staple of Saturday viewing, something that was familiar and watched by everyone in the playground, and on entering a fandom in which there were very, very few women - not to mention having a daughter who considers Doctor Who a parental eccentricity. Kate Orman's experience is the closest to my own and even there, as someone who was clearly far more active in Australian fandom than I ever was in British fandom, there was a strange dissonance, a feeling that this story had no connection to my own experience. I was interested to read these other stories of female Who fans and fandom but I'd have liked fewer that told the same, predominantly American, story and more that told other stories of female fans of Doctor Who.

Moving away from the articles which were predominantly anecdotal there were a smattering of interviews with, or in some cases, articles by actresses involved with Doctor Who. These were mostly pretty superficial. Better interviews have appeared with all these women in Doctor Who Magazine (except maybe the one who had played a villain in a couple of audio plays) and there weren't enough of them to form any sort of account of women involved professionally in Doctor Who. I don't' think Chicks Dig Time Lords had any real intention of chronicling the professional involvement of women with Doctor Who (certainly any serious look at that subject needs to consider Verity Lambert and she wasn't examined here) so I wasn't really clear why the interviews were there and their focus on the actresses heavily involved with the Big Finish audio plays rather than on a more general spread, didn't really help pull against the impression of superficiality.

That leaves half a dozen or so articles which, to a greater or lesser extent, focused on analysing either the treatment of women within the show, or within fandom. Kate Orman's veered between the analytical and the anecdotal and caused a big bun-fight in LiveJournal circles when it was published. It suffers from a rather awkward attempt to analyse Kate's uneasy relationship with LiveJournal fandom in terms of gender expectations of discourse which, intentionally or otherwise (and I strongly suspect otherwise), reads as if Kate thinks "male" forms of discussion are "logical" and superior. I'm not sure I want to get drawn further into that particular morass. The article makes many interesting points but its argument is too tinged with unhappy personal experience to really convince. K. Tempest Bradford's Martha Jones: Fangirl Blues and Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Have We Really Come That Far? by Shoshana Magnet and Robert Smith? are both interesting but say very little that hasn't been reiterated a hundred times in [community profile] metafandom circles. Lloyd Rose attempts a dissection of Rose's character journey in What's a Girl got to Do? which I found interesting but when I put forward her argument that David Tennant played the Tenth Doctor as asexual I was quite correctly (though very politely) laughed out of court on [livejournal.com profile] primeval_denial.


As an analytical book of essays on women and Doctor Who Chicks Dig Time Lords fails. It simply doesn't have the breadth of articles necessary. Moreover, some of the interesting questions about women and Doctor Who fandom can't easily be answered by this kind of work. For instance, why have there always been so many more women, proportionally speaking, in American fandom than in British or Australian fandom? This probably requires the attention of an expert in sociology and that sort of academic has a mixed, at best, reputation within fandom circles. As a book of personal experiences, the sort of thing that might someday provide valuable data to such an academic, its focus is too narrow. This is the story of the women who attend ChicagoTARDIS. To this outsider it felt overlong. It would be great if there were more books like this focusing on other corners of fandom as well, or a book like this that took a wider view of women and genre shows and fandom but, as it stands, it is clearly a fan project of interest mainly to the fans who produced it and their circle.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/46427.html.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-06-27 05:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lukadreaming.livejournal.com
Fandom has been rather badly served by academic studies, particularly those looking at the female presence. What there is tends to concentrate fairly heavily on slash, or you get Camile Bacon-Smith's ghastly 'GCSE in stating the obvious' book, based on a very shoddy ethnographical study at a con.

I think there is a conflict between academics studying the field and aca-fans. Rather too many of the latter want to tell their war stories. Which may be OK as far as it goes, but the accounts often lack critical rigor and an ability to stand back and reflect critically.

I was not at all impressed by a paper at a conference some years ago when one of the supposed names in the field (who, at the time, was lecturing at a uni) produced a paper which was presumably written on the back of a fag packet the night before and then played for cheap laughs. Her book was scarcely better and lacked any academic rigor - it's what a colleague calls 'commonsense theorising'.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-06-27 09:04 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lukadreaming.livejournal.com
I think there's a huge gap in the market for that sort of book. It's faintly depressing that the best book on fandom is still Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers, which is fairly old now. Jenkins at least made an effort to engage with and understand fandom. Other general books since then, including Matt Hills's, have been very much the male voice with women as the slash oddities.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-06-27 09:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] parrot-knight.livejournal.com
There's a lot still to do, specifically in Doctor Who fandom, in disentangling the generalisations of that fandom in Textual Poachers (brilliant, but as you say outdated) and in the volume he co-wrote with John Tulloch, Science Fiction Audiences, from the allegations made in their rejection (with another set of generalisations by Tat Wood in About Time 6 (broadly representative of some veteran male fans, I think). What late 1970s UK Doctor Who fanzines I have reveal a higher level of female participation than myth suggests, and story ideas which if not explicitly embracing the slash tradition more obviously represented in American zines which I've come across (through eBay, admittedly) place a higher emphasis on relationships than is usually expected from late 1970s/early 1980s British Doctor Who fandom.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-06-27 05:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pink-flame-87.livejournal.com
I got this book for my birthday last year and enjoyed it overall even though I agree with pretty much all of your insights. The aspect I found most interesting (as a young, female American fan myself) was the perspective on how other women expressed their fandom (costuming, cartooning, livejournal debating). Whether it's women or men the idea of loving something enough to be driven to interact with it in some way creatively is really interesting to me (and clearly something I relate to). As a perspective on women involved with Who and its fandom in general though it does fall short.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-06-27 08:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] parrot-knight.livejournal.com
I see my comment of earlier didn't get through (the library connection was playing up). I had said something along the lines of it still being a book I would recommend, but like some other titles from this publisher its success can't be measured in terms of the task which it officially sets itself.

Profile

purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
purplecat

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1234567
8 9 1011 121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags