Doctor Who And Gender Roles

Madeline Kodelja

WSG 210 A

Favorite Thing

April 7, 2014

The Doctor and his Companions: Negative Gender Roles

I have always enjoyed watching science fiction. I started watching Star Wars before I started kindergarten and have been adding more movies and shows to my list of favorites since. Movies, like The Matrix, Star Trek, and Prometheus, that are about traveling across space, learning about new and different places, and saving the world, have always attracted my attention and usually earn my respect as a work of art. So when I first learned about the television show, Doctor Who, I was immediately interested. It has kept my attention and love for three years now, because of what the story offers to me. It is easy to lose yourself in it and be taken away by the possibilities the fictional universe offers. It inspires me to want to travel and see things before I lose the ability, it reminds me what is important in the world and what my priorities, as a human being, should be.

Doctor Who is a television show about an alien, the Doctor, who travels across time and space in his TARDIS to save the universe. The Doctor is hundreds of years old because instead of dying, he regenerates and gets a new face and personality. Although he could regenerate into a woman, he has yet to do this in his thirteen incarnations; instead, the show provides a female cast through his Companion. The role of the companion is to travel with the doctor and temper his alien-ness with their humanity. The companion is a young, attractive female who is ready to leave the drudgery of her human existence and travel to the ends of the universe with the Doctor. Despite my love for this show, it’s obvious gender stereotyping and the way the women are wri...

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...ptable show for children to watch. This means a new generation is learning the wrong thing about gender the same as the one before. These children are told that a woman’s life only has meaning if it has a man in it and that a woman’s most important role is pleasing that man and doing what he wants. I keep watching Doctor Who waiting for the day when the writers are brave enough, and progressive enough to make a Doctor that is not a straight white male. I’m not alone in this, a large part of the community is calling for a Doctor who is maybe not just a woman, but is transgender, homosexual, or an ethnic minority. Once the show takes this next step, the gender roles will also disappear. If the show manages to maintain its popularity at the same time, then instead of a generation learning negative roles, they will learn that it is possible to exist without them.