Chicks Dig Time Lords
Jun. 27th, 2011 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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
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
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.
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
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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)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 05:29 pm (UTC)I very much doubt we'll get a good academic study in the near future though. As you observe the aca-fans are invariably too close to the material and fandom as a whole has been too badly treated by academics from outside its circles. Any outsider seriously wanting to study the topic is going to meet a great deal of obstruction from significant parts of the community, rendering any study partial at best.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-27 09:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-27 09:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-28 10:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-27 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-27 05:47 pm (UTC)I suspect that the editors' search for breadth was focused on that aspect without realising that the formative experiences of these women were, in fact, very similar. To someone outside of that sub-community their similarities were far more pronounced than their differences. That may have been an editorial steer, possibly if the accounts had focused more on their fanworks, and less on the story of how they encountered Doctor Who, and the progress of their involvement, then the diversity would have been more obvious than the homogeneity though I think they would always have been ham-strung by recruiting contributors predominantly from the same sub-community.
I don't think it's a bad book. It wasn't what I expected and I guess, at my particular point in my involvement with fandom it didn't have much to say to me that I didn't know, or hadn't read already. What it did have to say that was new to me, was repeated too many times to really hold my interest. It felt like it was a book for someone else, I suppose.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-27 08:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-28 10:43 am (UTC)EDIT: Actually that is overly harsh. I was engaged and interested through the first few essays, it's just that I felt they began to get repetitious and the vast majority were not adding anything to the material that had come before. It was too long for its message, rather than having no message.