Fan Phenomena: Doctor Who by Paul Booth

Author:Paul Booth
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Fig. 2: ‘The woman who came to the tavern’. (©Private Lives (1992); Doctor Who ©BBC).

American fanzines were often twice as long as British ones, and virtually every North American fanzine title from the 1980s was edited by a woman, with art and fiction provided by both sexes. Paulie Gilmore, editor of Jelly Baby Chronicles from 1983, did much of her own artwork and fiction-writing as well as contributing to other ‘zines; issue three from 1984 featured a portfolio from Cheryl Whitfield Duval, who edited two fanzines of her own, Time Log and Rassilon’s Star, and published a vast quantity of art and writing in other titles. Meanwhile, in Australia, a similar gender parity was at work, with Sarah Prefect joking in a 1985 issue of Cloister Bell that she would trigger a mass wave of immigration when she announced that the male:female ratio of fans aged fifteen to twenty-five was almost 1:1. It is unclear whether this was the case in New Zealand, with Rochelle Thickpenny – later assistant editor of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club fanzine Time/Space Visualiser – writing in 1992, ‘you ever notice how girls are in the minority when it comes to liking Doctor Who?’

A rare breed?

A shift seemed to occur in the late 1980s and early 1990s in British fandom, coinciding with the demise of Queen Bat. In 1991, for example, fan Karen Dunn was called ‘an unusual phenomenon’ at the Fitzroy Tavern, according to the Tav-based ‘zine Private Lives. Private Lives, which arrived in the wake of cross-fandom cooperation along with Brave New World, Alien Corn, Top, Club Tropicana and Circus, features a back cover cartoon in 1992 of ‘The woman who came to the tavern’, emphasizing her isolation and horror (Figure 2). Dunn wrote about her experience in 2009 in The Terrible Zodin, ‘There was nothing more likely to bring the Juke Box at the Fitzroy Tavern scraping to a halt than a woman in a Tom Baker T-shirt strolling in and offering the barman a jelly baby.’ Moreover, as North American fandom participation slowed down, female contributors to British ‘zines grew scarce.

Fanfiction was written by both men and women. Indeed, male writers dominated DWAS’s fiction ‘zine Cosmic Masque until the 1990s. Women writers did show a particular affinity for ‘mashups’, from Clare Ford’s Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 (Nation, BBC, 1978–81) work in Queen Bat (1985) to Cheryl Whitfield Duval’s book-length, self-illustrated combination of Doctor Who and Amadeus, Sing Sweetly, Sing Strong (1990). Catherine Siemann contributed the truly prescient comic ‘The epic of Doctor Who’, in which Hollywood execs ruin Doctor Who, in Jelly Baby Chronicles (1983).

Bafflegab is one United States fanzine which brought an unashamedly feminine touch to Who fan writing. ‘Uncensored scenes we’d love to see’ by Cheryl Whitfield Duval is an energized flight of fancy showing romantic scenes between a variety of Doctor/ companion pairs (Figure 3). In 1986, Audrey Baker lambasted the majority of fanfiction writers in Queen Bat, scorning ‘The Romantic’ (Mary Sue), ‘The Adult’ (sexual ‘shipping), and slash for ‘offloading [the writer’s] own daydreams’ on us.

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