Tag Archives: doctor who

Time Ladies: Adorable Gender-swapped Doctor Who

Posted on by

So. Darned. Cute.

Time Ladies: first 6 Doctors from Doctor who, represented as women by Gladys @ http://rocketssurgery.tumblr.com

Time Ladies: Last 5 Doctors from Dr. Who, represented as women. Picture by Gladys @ http://rocketssurgery.tumblr.com

Time Ladies: Doctors from Dr. Who, represented as women. Picture by Gladys @ http://rocketssurgery.tumblr.com

Picture via Gladys, whose artwork just took up some of my afternoon and I don’t mind a bit!

I should probably compile a post with some of the excellent gender swaps I’ve seen lately, but I know if I wait I might forget, and this is too cute risk forgetting.

So in preparation for a potential future post full of pictures… what’s the cutest gender swap you’ve seen lately?

Cool Hand Linkspam (1st June 2012)

Posted on by

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Featured image credit: ‘Links’ by rubybgold Ruby Gold on Flickr – Shared under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Quick hit: new feminist Doctor Who blog!

Posted on by

For Doctor Who fans, a new blog has launched, Doctor Her.

Doctor Her is the brainchild of Courtney Stoker, who has also written about Doctor Who for Geek Feminism:

Doctor Her’s first post is Which Companion is the Best Feminist Role Model for my Daughters? The start of an on-going research project.

Re-post: Steampunk, Tech, and TARDISes: A Cosplay Tale

Posted on by

During the December/January slowdown, Geek Feminism is re-publishing some of our highlights from last year. This post originally appeared on July 1, 2011.

Cross-posted at From Austin to A&M.

So the idea of my cosplay project (which I have completed a big chunk of, but am putting on the shelf for a bit, so that I can mull it over in my subconscious) was pretty simple. Most people give these very simplistic answers about their motivations for their cosplay: it’s fun, it’s for the pure love of the show, it’s about hanging out with other fans, I like the character, I like the character’s costume, etc. I suspect, like most fan scholars, that something more complicated than those reasons go into cosplayers’ decision-making. So I chose a particular cosplay trend—women cosplaying as the Doctor—and tried to get beyond those reasons, both through interviewing and by “reading” the costumes. Which, of course, has all got me thinking about my own motivations and decisions in the cosplay I wore to Gally. Obviously, the premise of my project is that cosplayers don’t necessarily consciously know all the reasons they make the decisions they make in their cosplay, and I don’t consider myself an exception to that premise. In fact, I knew I wasn’t sure what it was about a steampunk TARDIS dress that held such a fascination with me. I only knew, as I told a friend at the time, that if I could dress as the TARDIS and wear a bustle at the same time, I’d be a happy lady.

Bustle time! Me in my steampunk TARDIS dress at Gally 2010. The dress consists of a white button up shirt, navy blue corset with appliqued windows, navy blue skirt with panels and a screen-printed “POLICE TELEPHONE” sign, navy blue bustle, and black headband with “POLICE PUBLIC PHONE BOX” painted in white.

Continue reading →

Steampunk, Tech, and TARDISes: A Cosplay Tale

Posted on by

Cross-posted at From Austin to A&M.

So the idea of my cosplay project (which I have completed a big chunk of, but am putting on the shelf for a bit, so that I can mull it over in my subconscious) was pretty simple. Most people give these very simplistic answers about their motivations for their cosplay: it’s fun, it’s for the pure love of the show, it’s about hanging out with other fans, I like the character, I like the character’s costume, etc. I suspect, like most fan scholars, that something more complicated than those reasons go into cosplayers’ decision-making. So I chose a particular cosplay trend—women cosplaying as the Doctor—and tried to get beyond those reasons, both through interviewing and by “reading” the costumes. Which, of course, has all got me thinking about my own motivations and decisions in the cosplay I wore to Gally. Obviously, the premise of my project is that cosplayers don’t necessarily consciously know all the reasons they make the decisions they make in their cosplay, and I don’t consider myself an exception to that premise. In fact, I knew I wasn’t sure what it was about a steampunk TARDIS dress that held such a fascination with me. I only knew, as I told a friend at the time, that if I could dress as the TARDIS and wear a bustle at the same time, I’d be a happy lady.

Bustle time! Me in my steampunk TARDIS dress at Gally 2010. The dress consists of a white button up shirt, navy blue corset with appliqued windows, navy blue skirt with panels and a screen-printed “POLICE TELEPHONE” sign, navy blue bustle, and black headband with “POLICE PUBLIC PHONE BOX” painted in white.

Continue reading →

Connecting with female characters in geek television

Posted on by
Cross-posted at From Austin to A&M.

s. e. smith wrote this amazing post a while back at Bitch’s Push(back) at the Intersections: “I Just Don’t Like That Many Female Characters.” And I read it and was like, “OMG GEEK CULTURE.” Because, really:

‘I just don’t really like many female characters, you know?’

I see this coming up again and again in discussions about pop culture; this is an attitude I myself once embraced and espoused, like it was a badge of honor to dislike most female characters. I thought I was being oh-so-edgy and critiquing female characters when really I was engaging in an age-old form of misogyny, where people prove how progressive they are by saying they hate women.

I know, it sounds weird. But there is a thing that happens where some feminists declare themselves firmly to be ‘one of the guys.’ I’m not sure if it’s a defensive tactic, designed to flip some attitudes about feminism and feminists, or if there is a genuine belief that being feminist means ‘being one of the guys.’ Once you are ‘one of the guys,’ you of course need to prove it by bashing on women, because this is what ‘guys’ do, yes? So you say that you don’t really ‘connect with’ or ‘like’ female characters you encounter in pop culture.

If feminists feel pressure to be accepted as “one of the guys,” imagine how geek women feel, particularly early in their lives, when they often feel isolated from one another.

This tendency to dislike female character reminds me of another ”being one of the guys” strategy: I often meet women who tell me proudly, “I just don’t get along with women.* All of my best friends have been guys.” These women also often think that this fact actually makes them progressive (because nothing’s more radical than failing to create female-centric relationships!). And most of the women I’ve known who say this are geeks. It’s actually one of the reasons it took so long for me to become friends with geeks, because “I don’t get along with women” is dealbreaker for me. Any woman who says this is either a) telling me that I can never expect more than perfunctory friendship with them or b) inviting me to denigrate women as well, as the basis of our friendship. And no thank you.

Which is not, of course, to say that these ladies are horrible people. Women who refuse to connect with other women, fictional or real, are not causing the problem, but perpetuating it, because they’ve bought patriarchal narratives about women hook, line, and sinker. They seek connections with men, because men are the rational, smarter set, and by doing so they feel required to malign their own genders, because, as smith points out, “bashing on women” is just what dudes do. But loving other women, connecting with other women, is one of the most radical feminist act one can perform. And I think that goes for fictional characters, too, especially since I know that my personal path to feminism would have been greatly hindered if it weren’t for Xena and Buffy.

So it hurts my heart when geeks inexplicably “hate” female characters on geek shows. Indeed, the two examples smith uses are actually from geeky/fantasy/SF shows: True Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It seems like misogynist write-offs of female characters are disturbingly prevalent in allegedly progressive fan cultures (like the overtly feminist Buffy), and the ones that have been pissing me off lately are, of course, Doctor Who-related. A sizeable part of DW and Torchwood fandoms has a lot of ire for female characters from these series. The two I want to focus on, in part because hatred of these characters is well-represented in both fan communitities, are Gwen Cooper (from Torchwood) and River Song (from Doctor Who).

[Spoilers for season 5 of Doctor Who and Torchwood: Children of Earth (season 3) below the fold.]

[Trigger warning for imagined violence against female characters, slut-shaming, and other misogynistic language.]

Continue reading →

Linkspam barefoot in the kitchen (10th July, 2010)

Posted on by
  • Mystery and the Modern Woman: Tara Hunt writes about heterosexual dating, and men who are intimidated by heavy social networking “full disclosure” women.
  • Closing the Venture Capital Gender Gap: Astia’s CEO, Sharon Vosmek, writes about why she and Astia promote and support women entrepreneurs.
  • svollga points out a lot of irritating privilege fail in a discussion about the invisibility of queer characters in the current Doctor Who season.
  • Time to Hire a Housekeeper?: The study shows that highly productive faculty members, both male and female, employ others to help with core housework at a higher rate than others — but women do it much more often than men. (Note, there’s no discussion of any of the race, class or disability issues around doing housework or paying others for it.)
  • A Conversation with Ava Pope, physicist: Most physics majors don’t spend months carefully analyzing a few lines of poetry, let alone publish a paper on the research in a national publication. But Ava Pope wasn’t the average physics major.
  • skeptifem: Where are all the female skeptics at?: Anyone who has been in a skeptics group knows this discussion. Some dudes (and occasionally a few ladies) decide that it has something to do with the evolution of the mind and the innate ability of women to understand science or logic… These debates start because there is a noticable lack of women in skeptic groups, but also because statistically women are more likely to be religious or believe in stuff like psychics.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Lost in La Linkspam (25th May, 2010)

Posted on by

Spoiler warning: the last part of this spam spoils a scene in a very recent Doctor Who. There thus might be spoilers in our comments too.

  • Two-wheel triumph: Armed with a netbook, medical supplies and a bicycle, Bangladesh’s InfoLadies are giving millions of poor people access to crucial information on their doorsteps that will improve their chances in life.
  • Regis Donovan has responses to a few of our recent links at nyt: why so few women in silicon valley and ssh and sexism.
  • Why women were shut out of Canada’s science-star search: Their report… finds no deliberate attempt to shut out women, but concludes the tight deadlines for the competition, the areas picked for research and a competition where candidates on the short list had only a 50 per cent chance of winning probably all worked against female candidates.
  • Ableist Word Profile: Why I write about ableist language: When someone proudly assures me that words like lame and dumb and r#tarded are never used to describe actual people with disabilities, I’m fairly certain I’m talking to one of the currently non-disabled. Currently non-disabled readers, I’m here to tell you: those words, and any similar words you think are archaic and not used anymore, are used all the time, as taunts and insults towards people with disabilities…
  • Punding: “Punding†refers to repetitive, purposeless, stereotypical behavior typically induced by prolonged use of amphetamines or cocaine or by some drug therapies… a good example of gendered behavior that can look purely biochemical but which also, the slightest reflection shows, has a large social component that can’t plausibly be thought to be innate.
  • (Spoilers be here…) Quixotess on unacknowledged sexual assault in Doctor Who: What happened at the end of Flesh and Stone was sexual assault: Q&A.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

The linkspam-whore dichotomy (17th May, 2010)

Posted on by

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

a sentimental viducation

Posted on by

I’m not much of a night-owl but I remember as a dorktastic 80s teen propping up my eyes with matchsticks, almost, so I could watch the music videos on Rage, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s indie answer to MTV. I loved music videos then (Golden Brown! Safety Dance! Wouldn’t It Be Good! Wild Boys! Man Overboard! Big Time! Wuthering Heights! – I told you I was dorktastic) and I love them now (recent faves include Her Morning Elegance and Happiness.) At its best the three-minute pop music video is the Faberge egg of late-20th-century art forms; tiny, brilliant and exquisite.

Now a confession: despite being an avid lurker at the gates of fandom I have neglected my viducation. Oh, sure, I love the classic Closer, and I had Lisztomania on constant rotation after we lost John Hughes, but it wasn’t until Skud took me in hand the other day that I first saw Lim’s stunning Us. Fanvids combine the miniaturization of the pop video with the metatextuality and wrenching attachment of your favourite show. To marvellous effect!

So: what else am I missing? What else is there that’s accessible to the dilettante fan (Here’s Luck’s Superstar is fantastic, as long as you’re intimate with late-season Buffy/Faith power dynamics, whereas Francesca Coppa fave A Fannish History of Hotness is shiny crossover win), that marries beautiful music and apt lyrics to sharp editing and production? I like reboot Kirk/Spock and Spock/Uhura and Nine/Jack and Ten/The Master, and I will always be a sucker for John/Aeryn. And if anyone can find me high-class Hermione/Luna I will have your babies. I will. I like meta and politics and hoyay and angst and sweet emo pop and the funny. What do you like? Bring me your shinies! Otherwise I might have to do some real work…