Monday, September 24, 2012

Shooty Dog Thing: Part One


 


There are many fandoms to which I consider myself a member – Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, comic-book culture – but the one I feel the greatest sense of fan ownership toward undoubtedly is Doctor Who. To be honest, I primarily watch the TV show and devour the Panini official publication on a monthly basis, occasionally listening to a Big Finish audio and reading a spin-off book or comic when the subject matter interests me. Often, however, the show’s televised narratives and official interviews involving its stars and production people are not enough to satiate my desire to feel informed about the current state of the Doctor Who world, so I revel in going online and reading what my fellow fans think about this nearly half-century-old saga of an alien who travels time and space in an old Police Box.

Recently filling this gap in my fannish heart has been Shooty Dog Thing (Hirst Books 2010), by Paul Castle & Friends. This first volume collecting the best of the popular online fanzine Shooty Dog Thing runs the gamut from providing reviews of televised episodes and its ancillary spin-off to humorous ruminations on the often complicated state of being a Doctor Who fan. In his foreword to this collection, Paul Cornell, a Doctor Who “success story” in that he graduated from being a long-time fan to a popular writer of New Adventure novels and the new series itself, defends the rights of the fans who take the show too seriously, the ones who believe in “something huge and serious” and need to express it to their fellow fans. To this group, Cornell directs, “Write it in a fanzine,” adding, “If we ever meet, I’ll probably find you deeply irritating. But in many ways, that’s the point” (7). Cornell’s honest and many times true comment aside, fanzines, both print and online, are the perfect forum for allowing fans to participate in the community of Doctor Who. Like the young Harry Potter fans who find empowerment in Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture (See my last blog.), the type of Doctor Who fan whose voice may not be clearly heard in certain social circles achieves a sense of empowerment in this form of the written word. After all, many of us who are active online would agree that our print selves are finer, more coherent representations of our thoughts and ideas than our awkward physical mouths could ever express…  

After Doctor Who was quietly axed by the BBC after its 1989 season ended, the fate of the character of Ace, who traveled with the Seventh Doctor, was left in limbo. Her life subsequent to the show was charted in the New Adventures and BBC novels, the official magazine comic books, and in the Big Finish audios, but none of these narratives were composed in a single, unified strand. Addressing this issue is a piece by Castle and Stephen Gray, “Equal and Opposite Fan Reactions.” While Gray makes “The Case for Unification” by attempting to reconcile the various disparate Ace-story threads, Castle celebrates the incongruity occurring amongst these continuity-challenged pieces. Gray’s part of the argument does a respectable job of attempting to link together the stories, but I am more moved by Castle’s comment regarding enjoying the Ace-stories for their divergent narrative paths: “I prefer the concept of there being a collection of Doctor Who continuities to choose from, a mythos that’s structured like the tree of life, with different branches of the tree spouting from the main trunk” (38-39). Although Gray’s simile for accepting and celebrating continuity snafus is perhaps a bit hippy-dippy sounding, it does reduce anxieties in the minds of fans for feeling an obligation of sorts to impose the seemingly chronological pattern of our lives to a fictitious universe that should not be constrained by such petty mortal orderings of time and flat characterization.

Science-fiction television, as much as it purports to be about the future, often, through extrapolation of present events or the safe-screen of allegory, reflects contemporary anxieties and fears about the modern world. The original permutation of Star Trek offers a good case study of this storytelling approach, with episodes commenting on such hot-button topics of the later 1960s as race, the Vietnam War, and drug abuse. From time to time, Doctor Who has presented stories dealing with present-day issues through the lens of a future setting. Commenting on how the tales from the “classic” Doctor Who era (1963-89) serve as a barometer for speculating upon life in the twentieth-first century is Patrick Mulready in his contribution to Shooty Dog, “The Twenty-First Century Is When It’s All Gonna Change…” Mulready explores how respective stories from the Second, Fifth, and Seventh Doctors reflect the respective production teams’ feelings toward the forthcoming century at various times.

He also frames his argument with Captain Jack’s tagline from the opening narration for the credits accompanying the first two seasons of the adult-oriented Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood, which claims that everything changes in the twenty-first century, so humanity has to be ready.  I am sure that Mulready’s well-argued attempt to apply a line from a twenty-first century BBC show to episodes filmed decades ago for its mother series may have seem like an act of an obsessive fan to some readers of Shooty Dog Thing.  At the same time, returning to Cornell’s call for fans being given fair space to express their complicated theories on Doctor Who, Mulready’s essay is a testament to the fantastic type of analytical thinking that obsesses some fans regarding any particular object of study, whether it involves cult television shows, esoteric historical events, or when certain trains pass down a line.

The later part of the first half of this anthology collection I read this week concerns itself with reevaluating Colin Baker’s performance as the Sixth Doctor. On a personal note, I enjoyed Baker’s acerbic, unpredictable performance as the sixth iteration of my favorite Time Lord, and I cursed the BBC when they rudely sacked him from the role after two tumultuous seasons of being-the-scenes drama and inner-corporate politics. Luckily, Baker was able to continue in the role, first through a 1989 stage play, followed by unofficial spin-offs in the form of The Stranger videos, and then in official Big Finish audios, where he helped craft a better, well-rounded version of his Doctor. The series of essays found in Shooty Dog Thing thereby offer a positive reevaluation of Baker’s past and present contributions to the show’s mythology, standing in significant contrast to the unfair portrait of the Sixth Doctor in fandom circles as a clownish, unlikeable character whose troubled era signaled the death throes of the original series. Just knowing there exists a group of fans who share my views on Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor reminds me of the beauty of the written word and how it can reach out in the form of fanzines to remind me that I am not alone with my occasional unpopular views on aspects of the show!

 

 

 

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Convergence Culture: Part Two




I think of myself as a critical utopian. As a utopian, I want to identify possibilities within our culture that might lead to a better, more just society.

Henry Jenkins says these inspiring words in one of the final chapters of Convergence Culture titled “Conclusion: Democratizing Television? The Politics of Participation” (258). Upon reading this passage, I experienced a mental paradigm shift in regard to how I perceive the man. Since I have never met Mr. Jenkins or even watched a video of him speaking, my perception of this theorist is strictly limited to the person he presents himself to be on the written page. Some of the adjectives I thus would apply to him from his representation in the print medium (of himself and according to fellow media critics) would be genius, visionary, and media magician. Until I beheld the abovementioned comment, however, I would not have considered adding utopian to the list, but, in retrospect, it now makes sense to do so…

Let me backpedal first: in the second half of Convergence Culture I read last week, starting with chapter four, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry,” Jenkins continues his process of building an argument concerning the totalizing transformative power of what he deems to be the zeitgeist of convergence culture. In this chapter, Jenkins discusses the creative power of Star Wars fans films like Macbeth (1998), a reworking of the Shakespearian drama filtered through the lens of Star Wars in a high school setting by two amateur filmmaker students, and Revelations (2005), which depended on the efforts of hundreds of fans coordinated over the Internet. With these two examples, Jenkins’s vision of fans appropriating and adding original creative expressions to the source material has been realized.

George Lucas, in response to fan videos, has allowed for this type of expression to be legally contained within a Lucasfilm vetted and controlled web space (157), but his company ultimately retains the copyright to any original fan creations. A vivid alternative approach to Lucasfilm’s near-stranglehold on its fans culture can be found in the content of a sidebar titled “At the Mall of The Sims,” which shows how Sims fans are granted the web space to actively participate in that virtual world, creating additions to its fantasy reality without the fear of corporate lawyers threatening them with legal action. According to Jenkins, the later model serves as the type that will earn greater fan loyalty and add new creative life to a brand (173).  For me, this logic is soundproof as fans wish to be appreciated by the creators of their beloved fantasy worlds instead of being patronized, manipulated, and threatened by them.

This same caliber of logic is reflected in Jenkins’s next chapter, “Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars.” I found the most striking element of this chapter to involve the idea that kids are going online and forming Harry Potter fan communities in which they role-play characters, generate original fan fiction, and learn the mechanics of good writing from mentors. As Jenkins comments, “What’s striking about this process…is that it takes place outside the classroom and beyond and direct adult control. Kids are teaching kids what they need to become full participants in convergence culture” (185). As an educator who often blames poor parenting and too much media noise as major reasons for why the American education systems seems to be failing its young, the idea that the Internet can serve as an empowering educational tool for younger people is given some steam with the success of this fan community.

The final of six chapter discussions, “Photoshop for Democracy: The New Relationship between Politics and Popular Culture,” adds a serious layer to Convergence Culture in that Jenkins applies the theories of fan cultures to the realm of politics. Given that the theme of polices, centering mostly on the 2004 presidential election, is the centerpiece of this chapter and the afterword chapter, which focuses on the 2008 presidential election, I wonder if this material would have more resonance if it were developed in a separate division of the book under the rubric of “politics” or in a follow-up work. After all, Jenkins does confess at the beginning of the chapter, “In some senses, this book has been about ‘serious fun’” (218). Maybe it is the fact that the chapter is missing any sidebars (Yes, I love being annoyed by them at this point in my reading process!) without colorful content that casts the tone of this chapter in a sobering light. At the same time, Jenkins, a professed fan of various media creations himself, knows that all of us have to grow up once in a while and apply our passionate creativity for imaginary worlds to reality. Pointing out that knowledge cultures are adept at fixing problems, Jenkins declares that the process “empowers its members to identify problems and pose solutions” He then wisely adds, “If we learn to do this through our play, perhaps we can learn to extend those experiences into our actual political culture” (243).

In my blog last week, I began by critical dissecting Jenkins’s humble statement on how we cannot “meaningfully critique convergence until it is more fully understood” (13), doing my best to appear. Seeing how Jenkins is constantly involved with charting and analyzing new movements in convergence culture, (especially after reading his up-to-date-at-the-time afterword chapter to the paperback version of his text) I have a healthier vision of the man and a finer understanding of why he modestly refrains from offering a definitive prognosis of this new form of media culture colliding.  This is a prolific individual, as demonstrated by his continuous output of books and contributions to other theorists’ works (See my blog on YouTube – Online Video and Participatory Culture), who lives and writes about his commitment to informing students, the media in general, and, by turn, society itself about how one can either empower him or herself through participation in relatively new media such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, or be left on the sidelines as a consumer who has no say in the means of production surrounding the goods he or she purchases.

As I look for theorists to become part of my pantheon of critical influences for my forthcoming dissertation in a few years’ time, I can firmly place the genuine utopian thinker Jenkins in this personal mythology. Unlike me in my last blog, Jenkins is not the type of theorist to knock other scholars down in order to look smarter himself. All too often in academia, a terrible ethos of maligning fellow academics to appear intelligent, or intellectual, in that criticism balances itself upon criticizing others and their ideas, seems to be par for the course in the academy. In the future, for me at least, like Jenkins, I will strive to be a critic who will include the work of fellow scholars when the discussion leads itself to a positive discussion, incorporation, or building upon the fruits of their intellectual thought!

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Convergence Culture: Part One


 
 

In Henry Jenkins’s introduction to Convergence Culture (New York University Press, 2006, 2008 [paperback version]), the author takes a very Socratic approach to the theory of media convergence: “I don’t think we can meaningfully critique convergence until it is more fully understood; yet if the public doesn’t get some insights into the discussions that are taking place, they will have little or no input into decisions that will drastically change their relationship to media” (13). Since Convergence Culture has been become a seminal work in convergence theory, as it is taught in undergraduate and graduate courses across academia, the first part of Jenkins’s statement seems rather unnecessarily humble, or to return to the comparison to Socrates, perhaps he realizes his theories on the subject matter are brilliant in their simplistic originality yet open to rearrangement and adjustment by himself and fellow theorists at any moment in our relentlessly evolving technological culture. Approaching the second half of Jenkins’s claim, one can detect a sense of irony in his argument that a public forming online fan communities that have initiated a new-found engagement with media through fan sites and media platforms as YouTube need to be informed of the discussions taking place concerning this process. At the same time, I guess I am being overly critical of Jenkins with this statement as the term public can encompass people who have not yet joined the ranks of participatory culture to some degree. Then again, if we are to include the significantly growing number of users subscribing to Facebook and Twitter (which was still at a germination point at the time of the book’s publication), in the term, Jenkins’s call-to-action resonates as these newcomers may exist primarily as blind consumers, not participants.
This tension occurring between consumers who participate and those who are marginalized by corporate culture is well-balanced between the book’s first two chapters, which comment on the Survivor and American Idol fan communities. In the first, “Spoiling Survivor – The Anatomy of a Knowledge Community,” Jenkins shows how online Survivor fans have been engaged in an adversarial, ongoing game of one-upmanship with the show’s producers when it comes to figuring out the winning contestant each season, even successfully calling the winner of the sixth season iteration of the series in advance through the canny efforts of a blogger calling himself “ChillOne.” Jenkins also points out that the art of spoiling may be so popular with college students as “it allows them to exercise their growing competencies in a space where there are not yet prescribed experts and well-mapped disciplines” (52). From this vantage point, the hours many college students spend online may be viewed as conducive to them honing their analytical, problem-solving minds, assuming they still are devoting adequate time to their studies...

 
“Buying into American Idol – How We Are Being Sold on Reality Television,” the second chapter, presents the flipside of a show whose producers ostensibly declare, “America gets to decide the next American Idol,” while fans feel marginalized in their complaints that their votes have not been accurately reported due to lines being flooded (89). As Jenkins shows, American Idol heavily employs brand marketing in their partnership with Coca Cola and AT&T. In the case of the phone snafu during season three, however, AT&T had been adversely affected by the backlash, which, in turn, affected their fellow sponsor, Coca-Cola (93). Being a former viewer of American Idol in its early seasons, I was tuning in for the spectacle but mentally tuning out at the sight of all of the branding. Learning that the many members of public equally share this view reassures me that America is not populated by mindless consumers who are not immune to this form of over-brand exposure!
I similarly gained a new perspective on the two Matrix sequels in the third chapter of Convergence Culture, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn – The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling.” Hands-down, I believe the original Matrix film to be a highpoint in science-fiction cinema as it philosophically and visually challenges our definition of existence. The two sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, in contrast, felt like recycled, overly-long, drifting treatises on subject matter that had been clearly presented in the first movie. Jenkins, however, builds a convincing argument that the films’ content have been narratively diluted as they took a transmedia approach by telling its story across the media of film, an animated spin-off (The Animatrix), print and Web comic books, and computer and multiplayer online games (97). While the general public was disappointed with these later films, some members of the “knowledge communities” who engaged in the additional narrative pieces found across these multiple platforms, according to Jenkins, found the films more satisfying (125). With these facts in mind, I am beginning to reconsider the Wachowski brothers’s decision to present the two sequels in such a multimedia manner. At the very least, these sibling auteurs were attempting to be innovative and reflect a world that is as technologically and intellectually complex as the one presented in their films.

On a side note, concerning the appearance of Convergence Cultures’ text itself, I am a bit ambivalent toward the sidebar passages accompanying the regular chapter text. I admit that I enjoy their bold-printed appearance in the margins and how they present a contemporary approach to footnotes, which all too often give the impression that they are an author’s discarded, doggie-bag thoughts all too often best left on the intellectual kitchen floor. In a lively fashion, thank goodness, this presentation of Jenkins’s side thoughts seem geared to a graphics-orientated culture accustomed to processing several windows or images on a computer screen. Simultaneously, I have been forced to seriously concentrate on reading the regular text first before delving into this ancillary material. Perhaps if I were not so easily distracted by pithy side thoughts, I would not be complaining about this innovative approach to these interesting and integral (to Jenkins’s primary discussion) additional notes. My solution, however, has been to read the primarily text first before proceeding to tackle the content of the sidebars – one of two tough choices Jenkins’s and/or his publisher designed for me to make!
 
 


 
 

Monday, September 10, 2012

YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture

                                                   
 



YouTube is a continually evolving social networking site that allows users as well as corporate giants to generate original content. As a consequence, any academic work attempting to comment on this online phenomenon is dealing with slippery subject matter. Fortunately, researchers Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have begun the process of offering an in-depth look at the website with YouTube – Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity 2009). In this work, the authors discuss the proliferation of webcam cultures through the medium of vlogging (video blogging). Moreover, they directly address the issue of litigation in relationship to YouTube, in that corporations such as Viacom believe acts of copyright infringement are occurring with content that has been uploaded to the site (33). Later in their piece, the authors deliberate upon the negative influence of corporate sponsors upon YouTube content (105). In both situations, looming corporate monoliths are inevitably affecting a website that started out as an expression of individual creativity.

Thankfully, in contrast to these darker views, thoughts of an electronic renaissance sprouted in my mind when I read Burgess and Green’s comment, “YouTube, Inc. can be seen as the ‘patron’ of collective creativity, controlling at least some of the conditions under which creative content is produced, ordered and re-presented for the interpretation of audiences” (60). With this model of a media giant like YouTube functioning as a patron via its massive repository of user-generated videos, I celebrate the sites’ egalitarian approach to representing both talented and amateur YouTuber attempts at vlogging, making short films, and remixing existing media. Some of these people have become YouTube “stars,” and a select number of them share in the site’s revenue (98), which genuinely surprised me, as I did not consider that YouTube would actually pay any of its contributors.  I was similarly intrigued by Burgess and Green’s statement that YouTube is “evolving into a massive, heterogeneous, but for the most part accidental and disordered, public archive” (88) as I agree with the idea that institutional archives will probably not be storing or presenting a vast majority of the material available on the site.

Henry Jenkins, whom I have admired as a media scholar since reading his Textual Poachers back in the 90s also contributes an essay to YouTube titled “What Happened Before YouTube.” In this piece, Jenkins reminds scholars who have proclaimed YouTube as a phenomenal meeting place of user-generated cultural production and distribution that fan cultures, particularly science fiction ones, have been in operation since the 1920s. I especially appreciate when he points out, “not every amateur media maker wants to turn pro” (119). He also discusses the emergence of Astroturf, which he defines as “fake grassroots media-content produced by commercial media companies and special interest groups but passed off as coming from individual amateurs” (122). For me, any fake individual videos posted by companies, or corporations, which the law horribly defines as a person, are nefarious productions by large businesses, whose ilk have already wrecked economic havoc upon a post-2008 United States economy. If anything, YouTube should be a bastion of honesty and sincerity, even if some of the user-generated content is dark-hearted and offensive.

The second specially commissioned essay, John Hartley’s “Uses of YouTube: Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge” was more of an uneven read. The author begins his piece by pointing out the he and his fellow researchers in 2003-5 invented YouTube first in the form of a project they called the Youth Internet Radio Network, or YIRN. He adds that “just as [YIRN’s] funding ran out, YouTube was launched” (127).  Perhaps I am imbuing his writing with a darker reading, but I had the feeling that a sense of bitterness and resentment accompanied Hartley pointing out this fact. After all, YouTube sold to Google for 1.65 billion dollars in November 2006, a relatively short time after it launched in June 2005 (1). In light of this fact, I ask myself if Hartley would even have composed this essay if YIRN had instead achieved YouTube’s level of financial success. He does, however, successfully argue in this chapter that schools are lax in integrating “open system labyrinths” (131) such as YouTube into their educational structures from a creative, user-generating perspective. From a creative writer’s POV, I likewise liked how he points out that media such as television and movies are represented by “mere hundreds” of writers while millions of people consume their manufactured “stories, experiences, and identities” (132).  With this sobering reality in place, the need for original creative expressions on the web and fan communities is more pressing than ever.

On a closing note, I would like to mention the new working vocabulary I have acquired from reading YouTube – Online Video and Participatory Culture. This semester, when I read media theory books such as Burgess and Green’s, I compile a list of scholarly words I can apply to my future dissertation, which I would like to involve a gender studies approach toward science-fiction/fantasy/horror/comic-book cultures. Imagine my delight, then, as I add the following words to my working vocab list: DIY (do-it-yourself), DIWO (do-it-with-others) aca-fan, redaction, post-broadcast era, mediascape, participation gap, confessional culture, communicative ecology, mass-popular platform, and hybrid media space. Since I realize that all scholars in any field must, like anyone learning a new language, begin by learning basic vocabulary words, with an eye toward mastery of a particular argot, this acclimation process is both daunting and exhilarating.  However, I already feel more conversant in the scholarly discussions concerning YouTube and have already begun to apply theoretical approaches to this online phenomenon to the composition classes I am currently teaching.

Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It


 
 
As a Doctor Who fan since the summer of 1983, when my eleven-year-old self discovered my “Doctor” in the form of Peter Davison, I perceived my obsession with the show to be a primarily male pastime. Yes, I saw older female fans at local conventions over the next several years, but I never encountered aficionados of the opposite sex in my age group until the revival of the show in 2005. One of these contemporaries is Tara O’Shea, an insightful fellow panelist at the Gallifrey 2008 and 2009 conventions. As a result, it gives me great pleasure to blog about her 2011 Hugo-award-winning book (Best Related Work) Chicks Dig Time Lords – A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It (Mad Norwegian Press 2010), which she co-edited with Lynne M. Thomas.
 
An anthology that is one part academic explorations of the show, mixed with interviews with and chapter contributions with writers and stars connected with the series either in its televised or spin-off media, accompanied with fan memoirs and even a charming Torchwood Babiez comic strip, Chicks Dig Time Lords offers a multifaceted feminist perspective on Doctor Who. Of particular interest to me was the chapter “Martha Jones: Fangirl Blues, by K. Tempest Bradford, who does not shirk from commenting that Tenth Doctor companion Martha Jones, although she adores her, was a weakened character due to unfortunate stereotypical writing, most egregiously positing her as a Mammy-like caretaker for the white, patriarchal Doctor. I have frequently bemoaned Martha’s weak, and borderline racist characterization, to friends and fellow yet skeptical fans, so it was relief to see my critique echoed and well-articulated by Bradford. Martha’s successor in the TARDIS, Donna Noble, is likewise granted a fine theoretical exploration by Helen Kang in her chapter, “Adventures in Ocean-Crossing, Margin-Skating and Feminist Engagement.” Kang argues that Donna complements the Doctor as their relationship is one of equals rather than an unbalanced one in which Donna evinces a romantic need for the Time Lord.
 
The strength and heroic virtues of Classic Series companion Nyssa of Traken is also championed by Francessa Coppa in “Girl Genius: Nyssa of Traken,” as Coppa charts the evolution of the character from her early appearances in the series up until her current adventures in the Big Finish audio dramas. In all three of these chapters, a positive stance is taken toward the respective characters, praising their strengths in light of any weak writing on the predominantly male series scribes’ parts. This stance is refreshing to me as fans and critics will often fall into the trap of pointing out the role of the female companion as a clichéd, dull narrative function that simply relegates women to surrogate voice boxes for the curious viewing audience who may be baffled by some of the show’s intricate sci-fi/fantasy concepts.
 
Concerning the subject of female participants in Doctor Who fan culture, I was greatly enlightened by this text. On a personal level, I often argue that the majority of the new fans of the show since its resurrection are women. I make this assessment based upon the fans I encounter in daily life and at conventions. What I did not know, however, was the struggle that accompanied these fans in the past and the present. At the beginning of Deborah Stanish’s chapter, “My Fandom Regenerates,” she relays a humorous anecdote of an Eagles fan who snubs her love of Doctor Who in a Philly gym. Pointing out the irony of this branded, obsessive football fan judging her type of fandom is Stanish’s inroad to commenting on how, in the “social hierarchy” of “fandoms,” “sports would always be at the top of the pile while media fandom would be regarded as slightly suspect by the mainstream” (31).
 
If having my fears that sports fans think they are better than Whovians decidedly confirmed by Stanish was not sobering enough, I likewise learned from Kate Orman, in “If I Can’t Squee, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution,” that what she deems “fangirldom” has its online infighting in which they argue over with whom the Doctor should find true love, the strength of female characters, and with one another when emotions burn quite strongly. Gender also inform the art of Doctor Who cosplay, I learned, courtesy of Johanna Mead in “Costuming: More Productive Than Drugs, But Just as Expensive.” I had seen female fans wearing Captain Jack Harness and Captain John (of DW spinoff Torchwood) fame at conventions but had not entirely understood their choice for cosplaying these characters. Thanks to Mead, I discovered that these cosplayers potentially make this choice because, “If the setting [of DW and Torchwood] won’t provide a female equivalent, then female cosplayers will take the male character and make it their own” (59). Since fan appropriation of texts is part of loving a show and finding one’s own response to characters and situations that can be frustrating, I applaud this form of cosplay and its bending of gendered expectations for female fans.
 
In general, for fans and scholars (or the “aca-fan” – media scholar Henry Jenkins’s term combining the two roles) wishing to learn more about female participation in the particular fandom of the Doctor Who universe, Chicks Dig Time Lords provide a comprehensive cross-section of fans, actors, and writers involved in this unique subculture.