Doctor Who’s Feminine Mystique: Examining the Politics of Gender in Doctor Who By Alyssa Franke Professor Sarah Houser, Department of Government, School of Public Affairs Professor Kimberly Cowell-Meyers, Department of Government, School of Public Affairs University Honors in Political Science American University Spring 2014 Abstract In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan examined how fictional stories in women’s magazines helped craft a societal idea of femininity. Inspired by her work and the interplay between popular culture and gender norms, this paper examines the gender politics of Doctor Who and asks whether it subverts traditional gender stereotypes or whether it has a feminine mystique of its own. When Doctor Who returned to our TV screens in 2005, a new generation of women was given a new set of companions to look up to as role models and inspirations. Strong and clever, socially and sexually assertive, these women seemed to reject traditional stereotypical representations of femininity in favor of a new representation of femininity. But for all Doctor Who has done to subvert traditional gender stereotypes and provide a progressive representation of femininity, its story lines occasionally reproduce regressive discourses about the role of women that reinforce traditional gender stereotypes and ideologies about femininity. This paper explores how gender is represented and how norms are constructed through plot lines that punish and reward certain behaviors or choices by examining the narratives of the women Doctor Who’s titular protagonist interacts with. Ultimately, this paper finds that the show has in recent years promoted traits more in line with emphasized femininity, and that the narratives of the female companion’s have promoted and encouraged their return to domestic roles. 2 Introduction On November 23rd, 1963, a strange man known only as “The Doctor” landed on the British Broadcasting Channel (BBC) in a time-and-space machine disguised as a police telephone box. Doctor Who, now the longest running science fiction television show in the world, has transcended its humble beginnings as a children’s education show and has become an international phenomenon, viewed and adored around the world by people of all ages. Thirteen different men have played the Doctor in one continuous narrative which has spanned fifty years, and the creators, actors, and fans have all expressed optimism that the show will continue for many years. Although the actors have changed and the show has developed, some prominent themes, tropes, and story devices have remained. One such narrative device has been that the Doctor always travels with a companion, and that companion has predominantly been a young, conventionally attractive woman. She may have a family, a job, or a boyfriend, but when the Doctor appears in her life, she is willing to leave it all behind for a chance to travel through time and space. The relationship between the Doctor and his companion has often been described as the central dynamic of the show, and the companion plays a crucial role in the narrative. Current showrunner Steven Moffat described the story of Doctor Who as the companion’s story: “It was Roe Tyler’s story, it’s Amy Pond’s story—the story of the time they knew the Doctor and how that began, how it developed and how it ended […] The Doctor’s the hero, but they’re the main character,” (Jeffery, 2014). Eventually the Doctor’s companions leave him, sometimes because they choose to, and sometimes against their will. Each woman’s choice to join the Doctor on his journey and their 3 eventual departures present opportunities to examine the gendered dynamics of the show. Doctor Who’s longevity, influence, and gender dynamics make it an attractive piece of popular culture through which to examine broader societal discourses about gender. Literature Review Creation of Discourses Through Popular Culture Though choosing to analyze a television show may seem silly or inconsequential to larger discussions about gender in society, popular culture can, in fact, be a rich source of data. Jutta Weldes (2006) examines high politics concepts, such as globalization, as “discourses” in which subjects, objects, and narratives are ordered in a way to constitute a broader meaning. She argues that these discourses cannot be understood without incorporating sources within popular culture, which she calls “low data” sources. These sources provide data to examine how popular discourses are represented and constructed in the public in mundane, commonsensical ways. The one minor flaw of Weldes’ theoretical framework is that it conflates using popular culture as a source of data to show broader representation of discourses with using popular culture to show how discourses are constituted. Nexon and Neumann’s 2006 study of Harry Potter makes a sharper distinction between using popular culture as a source of data and analyzing popular culture’s constitutive effects. Their introduction outlines four ways in which popular culture can affect broader discourses. There are determining effects, in which popular culture provides information that helps determine actions; informing effects, in which popular discourses inform without necessarily determining actions; enabling effects, in which popular culture is used as a reference to support actions and ideas; and naturalizing effects, in which 4 popular culture make popular discourses seem natural. Though it is important to distinguish between using popular culture as evidence and using it to conduct a constitutive analysis, both efforts can be complementary and are often used in tandem. Feminist and Gender Discourses in Popular Culture Popular culture has become a ripe area for examining how discourses about men, women, and gender are created, disseminated, and become hegemonic. Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique (1983) is often credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the United States, was one of the early feminists to examine popular culture to see what type of discourses about gender roles were being represented. She argued that popular culture had a determining and naturalizing effect in creating and sustaining a rigid and harmful ideal of femininity. Friedan examined how women’s magazines throughout the 1950s created the narrative of the “Happy Housewife Heroine,” a woman who was earnest and kind, but did not need to concern herself with earning an education or building a career and, instead, should actively avoid those paths least she end up without a husband and fail to reach her ultimate fulfillment as a housewife and mother. The “Happy Housewife Heroine” narrative set rigid gender roles and stereotypes and, according to Friedan, created such a powerful discourse regarding femininity that many women convinced themselves that this image of femininity was natural and right. Since then, others writers have built on the theories of second-wave feminism and later post-structuralist theories to analyze cultural ideals of gender in popular culture. R.W. Connell’s groundbreaking book Gender and Power (1987) described hegemonic gender ideologies as the ordering of versions of masculinity and femininity at a macro level in society. The hegemonic 5 ideals Connell describes are, by necessity, a general impression of cultural ideals of masculinity and femininity. Though the ideals are hegemonic, that does not imply that they are totally culturally dominant or necessarily a realistic portrayal of the actual personalities of a majority of individuals. In many cases, they are imaginations of a cultural ideal or fantasies. There are multiple variations of masculinity and femininity, yet the “hegemonic masculinity” and “emphasized femininity” which Connell describes remain dominant through the exertion of political, physical, economic, and cultural power. Connell notes specifically that these cultural ideals are often constructed and reinforced through popular culture. R.W. Connell notes that there is no hegemonic femininity on the scale that there is hegemonic masculinity, however, there is an “emphasized femininity” that differentiates women based on their subordination to men. Because femininity is not constructed in relation to dominance over women and subordinated masculinities like hegemonic masculinity is, authority, aggression, power, and technology are not often major themes in femininity. In addition, the most important feature of hegemonic masculinity is its heterosexuality and it is often closely related with the institution of marriage. There are multiple diverse forms of emphasized femininity because there isn’t a pressure for one form to dominate another, yet they all are constructed in relation to women’s subordination to men. One form of emphasized femininity, which Connell found to be dominant in 1987, emphasizes compliance and accommodation of the interests and desires of men. There were other femininities organized around resisting or adapting to men’s power in society which emphasized feminine virtues such as nurturance, compliance, and empathy. 6 Since the publication of R.W. Connell’s book, many other researchers have analyzed how these variations of femininity have been constructed, contested, and competed against each other. Kate Milestone and Anneke Meyer (2012) discusses several sociological studies through the perspective that popular culture is an arena where these various ideologies of feminism are constructed and compete with each other and where the more dominant ideologies have been challenged