Doctor Who is a BBC transmedia franchise that has lasted over sixty years. Its fanbase boasts a substantial following of gay men. This book asks why this should be.
Through examining four core components – the Doctor, the TARDIS, the companion and the Daleks – this book traces the trajectory of queerness from wider culture to paratextual media and finally into the parent text, resulting in an inclusive brand. In doing so, it argues that fandom provides a space to mediate between personal identities and the wider world. Drawing from interviews with fans, the book demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of queerness, and proposes an alternative theory of gay cultural formation.
This is the first book-length study to use queer theory to understand Doctor Who. It will be of interest to students and teachers of media theory and fan studies, psychosocial studies, queer theory and history, as well as Doctor Who fans.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Introduction: A long-term phenomenon
- Introducing Doctor Who
- From gay to queer
- From queer to fandom
- Chapter structure
- Methodology
- Outline of the book
- 1. Fan Identities: Defining Fandom and Quantifying the Doctor Who Gay Male Following
- Introduction: Fan identification
- Defining the fan
- The pathologized fan
- The shifting status of fans: From outsiders to producers
- Psychoanalyzing the fan: The transitional object
- Psychoanalyzing the fan: Fandom as narcissism
- Transitional space: Play as an act of mediation
- Survey results
- Conclusion
- 2. The Doctor: The Hero’s Queer Masculinity, Performance, and Contradictory Morality
- Introduction: An alternative hero?
- The Doctor’s masculinity
- Class, costume, and historical identities
- Finding the figure of the homosexual
- Performance, performativity, and casting
- The Doctor’s race
- The Doctor’s gender
- Conflicting readings
- Conclusion
- 3. The TARDIS: The Queer History of the Police Box and the Possibilities of Space
- Introduction: Escaping the everyday
- The TARDIS as a closet
- The TARDIS as a police box
- Homosexuality, the law, and the police (box)
- Inside the spaceship
- The TARDIS as a transitional object
- Conclusion
- 4. The Companion: Queering Cross-Gender Relations and Childhood Play
- Introduction: A wide choice
- Introducing the companions
- Rethinking gender relations
- Queer relations
- The Doctor’s relationships
- Ace
- Captain Jack
- A return to the transitional object
- Conclusion
- 5. The Monster: The Queer Reception of the Daleks
- Introduction: ‘A safe scare’
- Understanding monsters
- Introducing the Daleks
- Queer anxieties of the Daleks
- We are the Daleks
- Posthumanism
- Queer Daleks?
- Daleks and other transitional objects
- Conclusion
- Conclusion: Will the Queerness of Doctor Who Fandom Change?
- Introduction: ‘Not just the gays’
- Queerness
- Paratextual media
- Fan mediation and the transitional object
- Where next?
- Index
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