| |
|
Bit of a late response but:
I don’t think you were being a snarky fem-nazi Deva – which is good, because as you should by now be aware, this season The Doctor is on OUR side. He might have made MISTAKES in the past, but he has put all that ABNORMAILITY behind him and literally been REBORN into the light. Be warned, any further talk of your bisexual textuality and we WILL send The Doctor to CURE you of your proclivities; the man in the fireplace can get to you anywhere and anytime he likes, and when you least expect it will MANFULLY SNOG YOU into RIGHTEOUS HETERONARMATIVITY! He doesn’t just stop your transgressions against sexual norms, he makes sure they NEVER WERE!
[I wonder if members of the religious right ever write SF slanted fanfic around the idea of a time-travelling Orthodoxy/Het Police…]
Ahem.
My reaction to the ('the ex and the missus!') stuff in the last episode was again more along the lines “the poor humans just didn’t get it”. Certainly my reaction to the kiss in this one was that it was incidental that she was a woman, and entirely relevant not just that she was a great historical personage but was possessed with a mind capable of assimilating and responding to the Doctor’s nature in just a few short meetings. I entirely take your point (Deva) that it’s much easier and less complex to present for it to be an incidental het-dynamic, and that there could well be pressures on the production of the show to conform (however consciously) to normative constructions of relationships. For the moment, though, in my mind the Doctor just happened to be kissing someone of the opposing sex, within a much larger and unseen/unspoken history, though again, if the increasing sexualisation of the Doctor this season continues along heterosexual lines it will be much harder to maintain that reading of the potential/ideal omnisexuality (one of the instances of that term’s comparative usefulness?) of his character as a credible one.
I was following your points on the bisexuality of the text up to a point, but I think to some my degree my heteronormativity radar (never going to catch on that one) probably isn’t operating just as sharply as yours here. I’d be interested in how you see the frameworks of heterosexual and homosexual relationships differing (other than their referents) and how that would affect the show practically. Currently I’m not finding it difficult to read the Doctor’s relationship with Mickey (as the most prominent recurring male character outside the Doctor) as anything but that they just don’t fancy each other – which is aided by them not having much of a relationship at all. But again, I sort of feel I’m missing something of what you’re actually getting at, so apologies if I am being a bit slow and traipsing off down the wrong path(s).
Funnily enough, following on from the idea of the current Doctor’s dynamic appealing to Who fandom, and possibly also this comment 'The Doctor used to come into my bedroom [on the telly] at night when I was little and there would be scary monsters, but that was okay because the Doctor always got rid of them! And now I am all grown-up I get to kiss the Doctor!’, I’m actually reading the “lonely god” descriptions as a way in which a particular sort of masculinity is sexualised. While the Doctor is a monster-banishing force, he’s also obviously not your traditional alpha-male brute force type of hero, and I think he has appealed historically because of his wit, imagination and problem-solving skills, and it is good to see that continued in the presentation of a modern role-model, and to have that include an element of him “getting the girl” only through being a non-typical weirdzo time-traveller rather than just being strong or handsome. Not that it needs to be a girl, or that (a comparison between the male Doctor and young male viewers simply being more direct) a non-typical framework for social status / relationships can or should only appeal to a certain kind of straight male. I wondered if this would be another way of potentially “queering” the Doctor without necessarily coming to a definite conclusion about his sexual proclivities? Or is that pretty obvious? |
|
|
