h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I hesitate to suggest that the person preparing the lecture is falling into a very dodgy trap with deconstruction, which is projecting meaning onto things without any evidence.

Firstly, it's quite offensive to say that because the main writer is gay that this would skew the entire series - especially because three of the other writers are heterosexual and haven't been questioned on their own 'straight' agendas (one of them even put a subtle gay subplot into his episodes precisely to subvert some of the accusations that had been levelled at Russell in advance).

But secondly the evidence in favour of a view that the character himself has suddenly acquired a specific sexual preference is non-existent. The character has a granddaughter and has only experienced what might be interpreted as romantic feelings towards females.

Funnily enough, there were other writers in the series' history who were gay and whose sexuality was never called to account. That's not to say that there were not gay characters. Harrison Chase from the Seeds of Doom is often identified identified as gay; likewise the Drahvin warriors from Galaxy Four (though that's as much to do with the quite chauvenistic approach of 'gender analysis' inherent in the script and the general sterotypes of domineering, independent women than any actual lesbian ovetones). Both Amelia Rumford and Vivian Fay from Stones of Blood could also be read as gay, largely through innuendo and, again, this is probably due to sexist views of female academics of a certain age.

The 1980s episodes were produced by John Nathan-Turner, who was openly gay and whose partner worked on the series. Some people have accused his 'light entertainment' casting policy of being influenced by a gay sensibility, though I believe this to be rubbish; he cast people who he'd admired in other roles who were then encouraged to ham it up by (often heterosexual) directors.

It's also baffling that anyone would see Christopher Eccleston's Doctor as being more codedly gay than his predecessors when we consider how Eccleston chose to reject the quite effete, posh approach of the other Doctors. A working class, abrasive Doctor who is clearly in love with his companion could be said to be quite decidedly less 'gay' than any of them.

I always had a big problem with lectures that were more about the lecturuer than the subject matter. I know the whole 'Death of the Author' approach is very liberating, but when you start to also 'kill off' every other influence on the subject until only your own world view remains you're on shakey ground.

I'd say there are grounds to suggest that the show itself is quite gay, in that its uncomfortable position within the hegemony identifies it as 'other' quite often. You could argue that the Doctor's refusal to have sexual relationships with his companions is down to the huge age difference (of between 700 and 880 years), but the fact remains that Doctor Who is one show where the main character's motivation is almost never sexual - in contrast to Star Trek, where 'relationships' figure more overtly than politics.

You tell he's in to Media Studies, can't you?

Well done Jimster, very eloquently put

Can I just point out again that despite Lucky's attention grabbing subject line the question in post one was about queerness not gayness.

Lucky, perhaps you could clarify this with the person concerned and get back to us?

Some very interesting points there folks, ta.

I'd phrased the original question deliberately "badly" in order to provoke comment - please don't take it as a statment of anyone's belief or opinion.

So which is it your sister is looking at - queerness or gayness?

Good point kea.

It does get confusing with there being so many words and phrases to describe or identify homosexualists.

Well I don't think queerness is limited to homosexuality. If people want to look at if Dr Who has been written as gay in this series that's fine, but I would say that is quite different than looking at if he's been queerd (as Lucky reported the lecture title).

Wish I could go to the lecture now.

Yeah the show has always been camp, yetits only when this writter with his out and proud lifestyle coupled with his past work (that word again) "Queer as Folk" that this question is asked.

Also as others have said when the last prvious series' were made no one would ask such questions, now we live in an age more focused than ever on our own actions and thoughts. Maybe media studies is just a way of combining ligitimate study of an industry and exploring our collective navels?

Yeah in a way Davies is damned either way. He queers Dr Who and gets accused of it, or he doesn't and gets accused of it.

Whether RTD 'queered' up the Doctor or not he still did a damned fine job, as did CE and, surprisingly, BP. If by making it more contempory he indavertently *did* 'queer it up' it seems to have worked!

Entertainment generally has become very metrosexual. Strictly Come Dancing might have been thought of as quite elitist and of limited interest, but somehow it captured an audience. One of Big Brother's biggest draws is its acceptance of sexual/gender diversity (coupled with its gladiatorial picking off of people who resort to diva / melodramatic behaviour). The hairstyles, fashion and grooming of celebs like David Beckham is codedly gay.

There's a really funny scene in one of Jake Arnott's books (True Crime) where a real hard-knock comes out of prison in the early 1990s and is horrified that the skin-head look has been appropriated by the London Soho set. He can't understand why 'poofs' have taken over a fashion that was reserved for racist jobs in the 1970s.

And yes, 'Gender and Sexuality in Society' is a module on almost every single media studies course. It's also the one that causes some student the most problems because of the free hand they get in interpreting things according to how they perceive them instead of how they are. Although I did read a really witty deconstruction of Action Man once where the author pointed out how he has no sexual organs but a full armoury of guns, which might lead the Freud-inclined parent to worry about over-compensation.

I don't really think this series of Doctor Who was any more 'queer' or 'gay' than previous ones, although I haven't seen all that many from earlier years...

I did enjoy it a lot, and thought that the character of Captain Jack was excellent in every way (hurrath for John Barrowman and all the script-writers). Note that they skirt around the issue of bisexuality by having the Doctor point out that by Jack's time, humanity had 'danced' (implicitly 'interbred') with a number of other alien species (as we already knew from the end of the world story) and are thus more 'adaptable'. And as Kerr (I think it was Kerr, anyway) pointed out, the Doctor's feelings for the tree lady were decidely more queer than anything between the Tardis crew.

David

I'm sure there's a 'wood' joke in there somewhere!

It is a bit weird discussing the sexuality of an alien, it would be no more perverted for him to have sex with a male human than just a human seeing as they are different species. Damn, I'll get shot down now for using the word perverted. But seeing as the Doctor appears male in every show, never regenerating into a woman, and only seems attracted to women it seems fair to call him hetero.

Look at what Star Trek did for race-relations. I imagine RTD might hope that Dr Who could help with homophobia in the same way. But I would agree, it is more a case of trying to make it modern. Reflecting the fact that open homosexuality is more common and accepted in society than in the time of previous seasons. Which I haven't seen any of.

I would also just ask again, why is it necessary to have a gay/lesbian part of drama studies? Why fracture it like that instead of trying to cover all under one course. Is there also a Communist Drama Studies course for finding Marxist tendencies in theather plays?

I'd have to say I agree with the idea that Dr. Who is no more "gay" than he has ever been, but that the *series* is "queer"-er, in the sense that it has a more relaxed attitude to sexuality than before, and in that it is simply television of its time, just as Dr. Who has always been.

Consider:
- Hartnell's time: a kid's show, nominally "educational", wholesome family viewing.
- Troughton: the sixties wear on, the Doc becomes more off-the-wall, the educational element goes out the window in favour of world-threatening aliens terrors.
- Pertwee: the seventies, colour, action, flamboyance, gadgets. Can you say "Bond"?
- Baker: counts as three doctors, for me: the first, flamboyant, eccentric, dark and terrifying. (mid seventies, a time I associate with a long, hot summer, Jaws and Star Wars). The second, funny, irreverent and light.(Later seventies, a time I associate with HHGG, The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise). The third, depressing, fatalistic and doomed, with a whizzy new theme tune and logo (the last season, a time I associate with Thatcher and the Empire Strikes Back).

I could go on, and I usually do, but I think I won't. You can deconstruct the next four Doctors yourself, with reference to their times, but suffice to say the genius of the latest series was that it was very much its own thing, a series of today, about today. It's been criticised heavily for spending too much time effectively being *set* "today", but for the first season I think that was absolutely the right thing to do. The new audience wouldn't be ready for a series set mostly elsewhere, not until they've got someone to "ground" them, a character they can identify with - and nowadays that means a lot more than it used to. Rose now has enough backstory to carry the audience with her, so I'd really like to see no more than one or two episodes next season with Mickey in - let's see the universe!

Oh, and post 54: Della said to Kerr "But even so, you do seem to have a bit of an issue with me. Or is it everyone? "

It's everyone Della.

Everyone has an issue with you. Hadn't you noticed?

SoRB

Once again, Hoo wrecks another thread with his spitefulness. I'm outta here!

SoRB <...the genius of the latest series was that it was very much its own thing, a series of today, about today. It's been criticised heavily for spending too much time effectively being *set* "today", but for the first season I think that was absolutely the right thing to do. The new audience wouldn't be ready for a series set mostly elsewhere, not until they've got someone to "ground" them, a character they can identify with - and nowadays that means a lot more than it used to.>

A spot on observation. With all the reality TV, Soaps, inward-selfishness the new, non-geeky parts of the, audience cannot relate to anything outside their own sphere of reality. They would turn off mentally as well as in actuality. This is why it has been so popular as people can identify with it more and like 'Goodnight Sweetheart' they can say it isn't REALLY sci-fi is it?

I was too busy to watch most of the new series, and ended up missing everything after that dreadful one with the Jagrafess (or however you spell it—I can't be bothered looking it up).

So I was quite suprised to read that Russell had included an openly bisexual character.

I remember, about six years back or so, suddenly realising that in all the TV shows I watched, there wasn't a single gay or bisexual charactar. It was striking that, considering that collectively the shows I watched had in excess of several hundred significant characters over the years, there was not a single individual from a sexual minority. And yet, paradoxically, a bigger deal would be made if (in accordance with statistics) any of these shows were to introduce a gay character.

Now, how many companions have there been in Dr Who over the years? And wouldn't it be just a bit odd if, out of them all, not a single one identified as "queer" in some way? So really, it shouldn't have been a suprise at all.

What's more interesting is that there's more to Jack's sexuality than meets the eye. It is actually speculated that sexual flexibility is a by-product of living in a society which deals with a variety of different species on a regular basis. Russell, it seems, is going far beyond mere "queerness".

I'm guessing that Jack wouldn't be totally averse to copulating, pollinating or otherwise engaging in exogamic behaviour with sentient non-humans, on account of having a broader view towards such things in general. And the same goes for the Doctor, in extremis: is it really feasible to believe that a super-intelligent, open-minded 800+ year-old, time-travelling alien from an intergalactic civilisation, who has spent his life doing the rounds of the known (and unknown) univere, is going to fit neatly to one end of a system of sexual categorisation with just two dimensions: gay—straight and sexual—asexual?

The Doctor has a grand-daughter, so he is evidently sexually active (when he wants to be). But to say he attatches any importance to being exclusively hetero/homosexual when, by all rights, he could easily be a sexual deviant beyond the ken of mortal men, is simply ludicrous.



- Jordan

I'm really fascinated by the chain of events that have resulted in this conversation. I'll clarify a few points: I had a casual conversation on the phone with my sister during which I said I was writing a queer theory lecture and had been enjoying Dr Who, seeing it as potentially interesting for a queer reading.


Two main points: Firstly, I mean Dr Who the programme, not the character.
Secondly, I lecture on a 'straight' performance studies course, not a gay/lesbian drama course. As someone interested in Queer Theory which, along with other poststructuralist discourses, utterly rejects identity politics as limiting and and a reinscribing of binaries, I would be deeply suspicious of any such course. Playing spot the gay person could indeed be seen as a reductive exercise,( and worthy of what the Education Minister here calls 'cappucino courses') although that sort of approach is not totally without merit, as the gay/ lesbian was invisible within the heternormative forms of popular culture for a very long time (still is, for the most part) and as part of the Gay Liberation movements which preceded Queer, it had something to offer.

I am teaching on a course called Myth into Performance which traces the way both traditional and contemporary myths work to disguise the constructed nature of what appears to be 'natural' or 'just the way things are'. This goes from Greek tragedy and its relations with myth, through Barthes' Mythologies, to contemporary myths of masculinity and femininity, and the way theatre and other performance reinscribes or challenges these myths. In my queer lecture I will deal with the idea of identity as a myth, arguing that it is both discursively and performatively constructed (through the work of the philosophers Foucault and Judith Butler).

As far as I am concerned, while Queer finds its beginnings in sexuality, by providing a model that questions the stability of gender, it can be used to read issues such as race, community, gender, popular culture, etc. It is a very slippery term, since to define queer would, as Nikki Sullivan states, be 'a decidedly unqueer thing to do', but there is possibly some satisfaction in seeing queer as a strategy or an attitude, as a verb rather than a noun, and considering the idea of 'to queer'. Sullivan gives a good definition of this as,
'; to queer - to make strange, to frustrate, to counteract, to delegitimise, to camp up - heteronormative knowledges and institutions and the subjectivities and socialities that are (in)formed by them and that (in)form them'
(A Critical introduction to Queer Theory 2003:vi)

In terms of Dr Who, I've really just been enjoying it and haven't formed any kind of attempt at a queer reading, (just Saturday night musings over beer and crisps). But it's not about whether the Dr is gay or not, or even if Captain Jack is, though my partner and I have really enjoyed those moments when the expectation that the world is always and already heterosexual are suddenly shifted (like in the hollow child when Rose is going to distract the guard and Capt Jack makes clear that he will be more successsful) . For me, it's simply about challenging 'the natural', the assumed, the 'way it is' and, by shifting our expectations, challenging a heteronormative world.

You can get back to me on that!