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

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[jblum]

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

...No, guys, this is turning into exactly the sort of "any evidence that disagrees with me simply vanishes" kind of discussion I was getting frustrated by above.

Remember, RTD is the guy who turned Sarah Jane Smith into a stalwart defender of the Earth under her own power (creating a series around her!) and turned Jo Grant into a die-hard activist who handcuffed herself to Robert Mugabe. In episodes he wrote himself.

Then there are the obvious counter-examples to what you're pointing to: women who carry the moral authority to pull the Doctor's reins in, from Queen Victoria to Adelaide Brooke (to Sarah again in "School Reunion"), not to mention Harriet Jones. (Again, note what I said about fandom not really doing ambiguity -- the point of Harriet's head-on collision with the Doctor in "Christmas Invasion" isn't that she's a power-crazed monster, it's that she and the Doctor are both going over the line -- and, as reinforced when we return to her story in "Last of the Time Lords" and "Journey's End", arguably she was right.)

When it comes to featuring loads of women over 30 in a variety of roles, both positive and negative, RTD has by far the best track record of anyone in Doctor Who -- as showrunner (and head-writer doing most peoples' final drafts), he was responsible for everyone from Joan Redfern ("Human Nature") to Ida Scott ("Impossible Planet") to Kath McDonnell ("42") to the Cassini sisters ("Gridlock") to Lady Clemency ("Unicorn and the Wasp") to Francine Jones to Donna Noble. Try to think of another era of Who which had anywhere near that many older women in their cast -- his seasons regularly had more in one year than Letts or Hinchcliffe had in their whole runs! Before RTD there hadn't been a single regular or semi-regular female character in Who over 30 since Barbara Wright. RTD cast four, including Donna -- five if you count River Song. (A role which could have gone to Kate Winslet, according to "Writer's Tale", but they ended up casting her nearly fifteen years older.)

This really does tie in directly to the sort of issues I was talking about in the essay above -- people spot a pattern, and then everything that doesn't fit their chosen pattern just disappears. And I really do think it'd be possible to deduce the shape of another "the woman" from all these data points, another missed sweet-spot -- there's clearly a very specific image of a sort of powerful woman hero who Russell never wrote, or presented as too ambiguous rather than clear-cut (a la Harriet), which is triggering these blanket condemnations despite everything he did do...

[londonkds]

But it is a pattern when over three-quarters of the episodes that RTD had his name on as scriptwriter have a very specific type of character as villain, and many of those that don't have big name returning bad guys previously established in the series. (And "Gridlock", which you mention specifically, is a rare Doctor Who episode with no identifiable villain at all in the sense of somebody acting maliciously.)

RTD did write female companions well, but that overlaps with another of my huge problems with his work which is a sort of "apostolic succession" approach to morality. Only people who have been properly initiated by the Doctor are allowed to be properly heroic, anybody who tries to be heroic or at all proactive without being OKed by the Doctor first turns out to be misguided or more usually a self-centred villain, whether they're male or female.

"Fandom doesn't do ambiguity" - I'd put that as RTD making vague gestures to ambiguity that sound ambiguous when you retell the stories, but in the actual experience of watching the episodes don't work. Because every time the Doctor does something dodgy the episode is guaranteed to end with a long close-up of David Tennant's lower lip trembling while one of Murray Gold's most sentimental themes slams in to try to force the audience to accept that Ten is a poor woobie beaten up by the universe who just wants to be loved. Compare "The Girl Who Waited" where the episode doesn't just put us in Rory's PoV to be appalled at the Doctor's ruthless and deceptive actions towards him and the two Amys, but actually stays in that PoV right up to the end. (Also, in the light of your argument about Queen Victoria as a righteous critic of the Doctor, compare the ending of "Tooth and Claw" where our last shot of her is a speech about creating Torchwood that is overtly politically unsympathetic in dialogue and has framing and music to point that up. And of course later on in Doctor Who and Torchwood it's quite clear that for most of its history Torchwood was a deeply malevolent organisation that occasionally saved the Earth as a distraction from its main job of robbing and murdering innocent alien passers-by and accident victims and dangerously meddling with Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know.)

[penguineggs]

I feel desperately sorry for Queen Victoria as she's portrayed in Tooth and Claw because that's an episode where Ten and Rose are constantly, childishly rude to her even when people are dying around them; where she's desperately afraid she's been infected by lycanthropy and that, too, is treated as a joke by the Doctor (with the line about "well, that explains the Royal Family").

[surliminal]

Also (just to throw into a long gone argt one of my own pet hates here), who says gender positivity (whatever that is) has to be assessed by how many female air pilots or goddesses or um vampire slayers there are in a series? isn't it about something a little less moral-plus-pointy, like agency and independence? I'd rather see a series full of female serial killers than one full of female oh housewives.. (though again a female housewife like some I know who teach their kids to crochet daleks or bake green alien cakes or generally NOT BE DULL would be fine)