“We’re the most civilised civilisation in the universe. We’re billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.”
Doctor Who S10 E11, ‘World Enough and Time’ (2017)
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| Thanks to ElliotDraws on newgrounds.com for this very lovely sketch of the impending Thirteenth Doctor. |
“So, as a Whovian…”
Who was it that told me you really know you
belong to a minority group when someone qualifies his or her request for your
opinion about some matter of importance by asking what you think as a such-and-such?
Granted, I think the person in question was more thinking of issues of race,
disability, and other traits covered by the Equality Act 2010,1 but
maybe a slight and smilingly ironical echo of the sentiment might be applied to
the manner in which some of my friends have been inquiring after my opinion on
the BBC’s controversial casting decision during the month and a half since it
was announced.
“So, as a Whovian, what do you think of the
new Doctor being a woman?”
All right, so I’m a little late to the opinion-hurling
party. If you had been hoping that all the irritating ruckus over that
particular issue had now died down and wouldn’t flare up again until the
Christmas special at the very earliest, I do apologise, and shan’t be in the
least offended if you take the custom of your gaze elsewhere (I hear there are
some excellent cat videos available on YouTube). If, on the other hand, my
tuppenceworth on the subject is of any interest to you – I speak as a
Whovian, after all – then by all means read on.
My answer to the question is twofold.
First off, if Doctor Who existed in
a societal and cultural vacuum – if the only issues with any bearing on the
matter were universal standards of right and wrong or truth and falsehood, and
the programme’s own canon – I would have absolutely no problem with the
decision. Crucially, a Time Lord is not a human being and is not supposed to
be a human being. Those responsible for defining, clarifying, and expanding the
characteristics of this fictional species – the writers – can basically do what
they like. Time Lords have two hearts; they can survive extreme cold, radiation
poisoning, and brief exposure to the vacuum of space;2 their brains
are capable of everything from telepathy to mind-wiping to perceiving all
possible timelines at once3 – plus, of course, they can cheat death
by generating a replacement body for themselves whenever their current one is
on the brink of expiry. In that whole vast catalogue of impossibilities, the
ability to swap sexes is surely small potatoes.
It was already clear that there’s a sense
in which two regenerations of one Time Lord aren’t quite the same person. There’s
that joyous bit of The Christmas Invasion, for instance, where
the factory-fresh Tenth Doctor tries to work out what sort of personality his
new self has, and catches himself by surprise with his own rudeness. At the
other end of the Tenth Doctor’s run, he laments to Wilf that regeneration doesn’t
feel like straightforwardly carrying on as the person he was: “Some new man
goes sauntering away, and I’m dead.” Granted, he said ‘man’, but arguably he
was speaking purely from his own experience as it was at that stage, and more
to the point, it has been explicitly indicated in recent series that the
possibility of a sex change is, canonically, part and parcel of the
regeneration process. I think the first real confirmation of this was in The
Doctor’s Wife, when the Doctor recognised a symbol emblazoned on a message
he received: “The mark of the Corsair. Fantastic bloke. He had that snake as a
tattoo in every regeneration. Didn’t feel like himself unless he had the
tattoo. Or herself, a couple of times. Ooh, she was a bad girl.” Since then, of
course, we’ve had a female regeneration of the Master, as well as a scene in
which a Time Lord called the General (who is, by all accounts, actually a
general) regenerates from a white man into a black woman – “Oh, back to normal,
am I? The only time I’ve been a man, that last body. Dear Lord, how do you cope
with all that ego?” – which I feel was probably supposed to be Making A Point, as
the writers of the Matt Smith era were so infuriatingly fond of doing in a loud
and preening manner. But anyway, my point is that canonically, there’s no
issue. We the viewers find out new bits of Time Lord lore all the time; we’ve
now found out that they can change sex when they regenerate.4
Better than merely being canonically
unproblematic, however, a female Doctor has, I’d say, the potential to be very
interesting viewing. Doctor Who thrives off the way its protagonist
changes. It would be terrible if every new actor to take up the mantle (/bow
tie/leather jacket/big long scarf) tried to wear it in the exact same way as
his (or her!) predecessor. The Whovian community at large rolled their eyes,
for instance, at those who criticised Matt Smith as too young for the role or
Peter Capaldi as too old (were they even aware of the pre-New-Who era?):
much as we might mourn the departure of a favourite, we want to get to
know a new Doctor, a different kind of Doctor, one who displays our hero’s unaltered
wit and courage and compassion in ways we haven’t seen before. Honestly, I’m
excited to see what Ms. Whittaker does with the role.
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| Who knows where the TARDIS might take her? Thanks to the talented Sysica, also on newgrounds.com. |
But.
But Doctor Who does not, of course,
exist in a societal and cultural vacuum. On the contrary, this casting decision
came with more baggage than Donna Noble produced from the boot of her car upon
being re-invited to join the Doctor on his travels. Suddenly everyone and his
mother is strewing the Internet with exclamations to the effect that finally
we have a female Doctor, though it feels as if it’s been barely five
minutes since the possibility of there being a female Doctor was even seriously
raised;5 and everyone else and his mother is ranting about
political correctness gone mad and spilling NotMyDoctor hashtags all over the
shop. The controversy is not about canon; it’s about social and cultural agendas.
Once again, the writers of Doctor Who are Making A Point.
Unfortunately, it’s not, in my opinion, a
very good one.
The Doctor isn’t the first
beloved character who’s undergone a male-to-female transformation in recent
years. In 2014, Marvel released a Thor comic that saw the Asgardian Avenger in
a female incarnation. “This new Thor isn’t a temporary female substitute – she’s
now the one and only Thor, and she is worthy,” said Marvel editor Wil Moss. The
comic’s author Jason Aaron, meanwhile, stated: “This is not She-Thor. This is
not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is Thor. This the Thor of the Marvel
Universe. But it’s unlike any Thor we’ve ever seen before.”6 Marvel
also had Tony Stark hand over the mantle (or rather high-tech super-suit) of
Iron Man to a woman in a 2016 comic.7 Another product of 2016 was
the Ghostbusters remake in which the four main characters were women, having
all been men in the original 1984 version.8 A film adaptation of Lord
of the Flies featuring a group of girls is in the pipeline.9 The
trend of replacing traditionally male characters with female reincarnations is
indisputably present, and the decision to cast a woman as the Thirteenth Doctor
sits squarely within it.
Well, what’s wrong
with that? you may interject. Isn’t it a good thing that there’s an increasing
volume of media out there with female-centred storylines? Isn’t it a good thing
that women are being featured in aspirational roles? Isn’t it a good thing that
fiction should communicate that women are just as important and interesting and
capable as men?
And I’d agree.
Heartily. If the upsurge in female-centred storylines were down to an increase
in people creating original stories about women, I’d unilaterally applaud it.
But it isn’t. It’s down to female versions of characters being plonked into the
shoes of previous male versions.
That carries the
implication that a female character can’t be important and interesting and
capable in her own right, but that people might take an interest in her if she
borrows some cred from a male predecessor. It carries the implication that the
way to demonstrate that women are important and interesting and capable is to
have them do the same things men do, after the men have already done them. It carries
the implication that redressing issues of gender inequality requires women to
attain to qualities of maleness – and therefore that maleness is better than
femaleness.
If Doctor Who existed
in a vacuum, I would be nothing but excited for Jodie Whittaker to take over
the title role. But because it doesn’t, I worry that it’s adding its
influential voice to a great number of others claiming that the way to improve
the representation of women in media is to replace traditionally male
characters with female reincarnations. I worry that it’s making itself part of
the problem even as it presents itself as part of the solution.
You know, speaking as
a Whovian…
Footnotes
1 Which covers lots of
other things too: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents.
2 See e.g. ‘42’, ‘Smith
and Jones’, and ‘Oxygen’ respectively.
3 See e.g. ‘The Girl in
the Fireplace’, ‘Journey’s End’, and ‘Rose’ respectively.
4 Thanks to chakoteya
for the very handy transcripts that furnished this paragraph with its
quotations, http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/index.html,
and to NowMyWingsFit for recommending the site.
5 I’m not counting
Joanna Lumley’s brief appearance in the role in the altogether-hilarious-and-well-worth-watching-go-on-give-it-a-watch
1999 Comic Relief special ‘The Curse of Fatal Death’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp_Fw5oDMao,
as a serious raising of the possibility.
6 I got all that from
this article: http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/marvel-introduces-first-female-thor-in-new-comicbook-series-1201262561/.
7 Here’s my source: http://time.com/4394478/iron-man-riri-williams-tony-stark/.
8 Have a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ugHP-yZXw.
9 According to this
site, http://deadline.com/2017/08/lord-of-the-flies-scott-mcgehee-david-siegel-female-cast-warner-bros-william-golding-novel-1202158421/,
and also Classic FM the other morning.
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