A Scandal in Fandom: Steven Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze

[jblum]

The thing about the latest round of "Is Steven Moffat sexist?" that's currently flapping round the blogosphere, is that if within the same week you can manage to get accused of hating women by a Guardian blogger, and simultaneously accused of championing women and hating men in the Christmas special by the Daily Mail ... you're probably doing

Comments

[azarsuerte]

Interesting analysis. You raise some good points, and while I don't agree with all of them, I at least find them thought-provoking

[frankymole]

It seems unfair to criticise an Irene close to Conan Doyles for not being the non-ACD one that you admit you have in your head.

Or do you think Moffat's Irene was further from ACD's?

[azarsuerte]

I'm not criticizing her. I'm just saying my wants for the character were so shaped by CND's interpretation that I knew there was no way the Irene I wanted was going to be the Irene we got (unless Moffat was a closet fan of the CND books *g*). So I wasn't happy with the character, but I'm fully acknowledging the problem to be with my expectations, not necessarily Steven Moffatt's writing

[pbristow]

I think you're mis-reading.

I read azarsuerte's analysis (in her third para) of Moffat's Adler as being entirely independant of her affection for CND's version. She alerts us (in her 2nd para) - wisely and honestly - to her affiliation with the CND version over the ACD version *just in case* she is being unduly influenced by it... But then goes on (in the 3rd para) to critique Moffat's version quite incisively as "it's own beast".

Rather than tyring to judge Moffat's/"Sherlock"'s (bearing in mind there are more artists at work here than just the scriptwriter) in terms of "distance" from previous versions (either ACD's or CND's), as you seem to be assuming/asking for, azarsuerte has done her best to give us an analysis of *her own* reaction to *this specific version*... With supplementary information (presented first) as to some of the factors that may be, despite her best intentions, colouring her analysis.

[paula_moore]

I have nothing brainy to add to this, but I did wish to applaud it nonetheless.

[ext_945914]

This is a really excellent post, and there's a lot of things in it I hadn't considered; will definitely be mulling over this for a while! No offense taken whatsoever :) As is obvious, I was quite steamed when I wrote my original piece, and so was neither as tactful nor as balanced as I could have been. That's not an excuse - I said what I said, and should own it - but it does mean I'm willing to move forward from that point, and have a more robust discussion of what's going on

[ext_945914]

Gail Simone, when writing about the Women in Refrigerators problem in comics, said something really important about her experiences speaking with the writers of the comics that made her list. She said, in a nutshell, that every single one of them could come up with a narrative justification for why that particular woman had been stuffed in the fridge. But the problem wasn't the individual stories, or the strength of their individual justifications. The problem was that all of them, independently, had elected to stuff women in the fridge: that there was a *culture* of women being killed and depowered in comics, and that even though the culture, and not the individual stories, was the problem, the only way to address the problem was, ultimately, at the level of individual stories

[kattahj]

The thing with patterns, though, is that there can be more than one of them simultaneously, and sometimes contradicting ones. I found your post baffling in that it suggested that Matt Smith's Doctor was any ruder to his companions than any of the previous ones, and frankly insulting in that it suggested that the only reason fans could still stick around was for the men).

Moffat has some largely problematic ideas about women, yet he simultaneously writes female characters that I love with all my heart. (Though I admit that this doesn't cover Sherlock, which I've mostly found "meh" on all counts, but I've loved pretty much all women in four of his other shows.) This to me is no stranger than that Aaron Sorkin could simultaneously write fantastic female characters in West Wing and keep undercutting them with sexist remarks, or that Joss Whedon can be a feminist and still have no surviving female characters older than forty

[penguineggs]

As a project last year, when Toby and I started rewatching all the new Who episodes from Rose onwards (we're still in the middle of this, BTW), I decided to take notes, episode by episode, on how the female characters fare.

That's interesting, because I've carried out an analysis of all sixty RTD episodes and although you state that "female extras die roughly in parity with male extras" at the point to which you've watched, in fact across the whole sixty things are very different. My analysis concentrated in particular on Self Sacrificial Deaths (SSDs),a category I defined as follows SSD: Self Sacrificial Death. M/F is used to indicate whether the self-sacrificing person is male or female (if known). This is used where a) the person concerned made an informed decision to put themselves in a position of maximum danger to give other people a chance to escape/succeed in their mission and b) they in fact died (irrespective of what happened afterwards). As a result, Captain Jack’s death in “The Parting of the Ways” is included, but not

[londonkds]

Via various links: my problem with RTD's portrayal of women in Doctor Who is the number of his personally-written episodes in which women aged over thirty who are not primarily housewives are monsters and/or powercrazed villains, and the lack of any positive characters of that nature: Cassandra, Blon Slitheen, Harriet in "The Christmas Invasion", the Matron in "New Earth", Yvonne Hartman, the Racnoss Queen, the Plasmavore, Miss Foster, Miss Hartigan, the prison warders in "End of Time". Not to mention Suzie in Torchwood and Col. Karim in "SJA: Death of the Doctor".

It makes me very reluctant to agree with anyone who declares Moffat to be a misogynist while lauding RTD for the unprecedented woman-friendliness of his Doctor Who.

[pujaemuss]

Really interesting analysis. Thank you.

PJW