purplecat

Some of you may recall Chicks Dig Time Lords which I found a lot less compelling than everyone else, it seems, since it went on to win a Hugo. It's not terribly surprising that there have been several follow-ups including Queers Dig Time Lords.

My main criticism of Chicks Dig Time Lords was that it didn't feel to me to be much about being a woman who likes Doctor Who so much as being about being a woman who goes to the Chicago Tardis convention. With one or two exceptions I found the contributions to be, ultimately, a bit repetitive.

Thankfully Queers Dig Time Lords doesn't suffer from this nearly so much. It has contributions from a much wider spread of fans, both geographically and in terms of when and how they became engaged by the series. There is also a much wider set of takes on the subject matter. Chicks Dig Time Lords was mostly in the form of memoirs - "this is how I got into Doctor Who and this is the fannish thing I do now". While Queers Dig Time Lords has several of these, it also has several essays which focus much more upon the show itself, whether it be simply celebrating some aspect of it that the writer felt particular did (or did not) resonate with their own queerness, essays that seek to understand what it is that particular attracts QUILTBAG people to the show, and a couple that challenge the assumptions that there are a lot of gay men in Doctor Who, or indeed that the show (in either of its incarnations) has been particularly queer-friendly.

There are a lot of essays in the book and so, inevitably a certain amount of repetition and some misses, but it is well worth a look. I wish Chicks Dig Time Lords had been as diverse and interesting as this.

I'm guessing Who Goes There by Nick Griffiths was supplied by a relative. I don't think it is the kind of book I would purchase myself any more. I spent a lot of the book trying to puzzle out what exactly it was trying to do. Ostensibly its the tale of Griffiths' visits to various Doctor Who locations.

( Possibilities considered )

I was actually surprised how alienating I found this book. Obviously Who fandom isn't a monolith by any stretch of the imagination, but I this was the first time I've read something by a Doctor Who fan with whom, it would seem, I have virtually nothing in common.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/15481.html.

This is an oddly schizophrenic book and its clear that the authors had rather different conceptions about its primary audience. Jonathan Bignell and Alec Charles, for instance, are clearly writing essays targetted at an academic audience with a strong background in the theory and jargon of media studies and/or social science (since I'm not an academic in these areas it is difficult to tell which, precisely). Most of the authors settle for writing in an academic style but with an eye to being readily comprehensible by the lay man and a few, particularly in the final section, write pieces that wouldn't be out of place in DWM; light on academic theory and sprinkled with fannish in-jokes.

It also suffers from the accident of timing. It is a collection of essays studying Doctor Who with a particular emphasis on its evolution and its cross-media forms. Sadly, although published in 2007, its essays are all based on presentations given in 2004 so its contents are forced to largely ignore the developments of the new series. This renders most of the essays instantly out-of-date which is a shame because every single one of them (even those that are jargon heavy and difficult to follow) have something interesting to say but you wish that the new series perspective could also have been brought into play.

The other interesting observation I made across all the essays in the book was a more personal one. When I did my PGCHE (Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education) much was made about discipline context and assumptions. So I was struck by two "discipline assumptions" here. Firstly, and this is peculiar to Computer Science, we write predominantly to page counts. Unlike most disciplines which publish in journals we publish predominantly in conferences generally with a 15 page limit. This causes problems (B. often complains about the lack of necessary detail in CS papers), but it also forces you to ruthlessly prune out, for instance, additional interesting examples which are, perhaps, not central to your point. So I found several of the essays "unnecessarily verbose". In particular I felt that they marshalled more examples to make their point than was strictly necessary, almost to the point of mindless listing in some cases. Secondly it seemed very problematic, to me, to try and make a point about the body of work that is Doctor Who as a whole based on selected examples. In something as diverse and multi-authored as Doctor Who (a fact stressed by several of the essays) I couldn't work out what the criteria could be for choosing representative examples since a counter-example was almost bound to come along within a couple of years, if not sooner. How do you distinguish the trend from the one-offs? I suspect this is something obvious to someone within the discipline (or at least, the accepted processes are obvious though they presumably also have their within discipline critiques).

It's too daunting to try and cover all the individual essays in one post and there are things I want to say about several of them. So I'm going to group them together into a number of subsequent posts.

I wouldn't recommend this to a general reader, but anyone interested in a theoretical take on the development and impact of Doctor Who or with a more general interest in the nature of popular culture and television programs in particular, will find lots to sink their teeth into here.