Chicks Dig Time Lords

[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 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.

Comments

[purplecat]

One thing that was refreshing, in terms of women examining fandom, was a lack of focus on slash and an acknowledgment of the much more diverse ways people interact with fandom. I did get a bit tired of the emphasis on "squee!" though. As a term for a particular kind of reaction, I like squee, and I like the way squeeing is now a recognised part of loving a show. But I dislike it as some kind of badge of membership or some kind of marker of the lines between "male" and "female" (or old-skool and new-skool) fandom, and I in some ways I find an over-emphasis on squeeing as an activity, infantilises fans by implying that some kind of initial gut-reaction to a piece is as far as we ever get.