Watch this entire presentation: Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)
For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
Transcript:
So Russell Davies brought this new thing into the program — this new ability to represent. Now we have Steven Moffat who took over after Russell Davies and sometimes there’s controversy over Steven — was he as good, people don’t like him or they do like him. I think he did a lot of good things for the show particularly in paying with what kinds of women who traveled with The Doctor and how they were represented. Right? He gave us Amy Pond who’s married to a male nurse. We have a man in a generally, stereotypically female job and they are this perfect, lovely little couple. So I think that’s cool. He gave us Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the daughter of a character that I’ll talk about in a little bit and she’s a Brigadier in the Army. He gave us Mels who is a Time Lord herself. We’ll talk about here in a minute. he gave us the first lesbian couple and it’s a lesbian alien-human couple. Right? You can’t get much more representative than that. Right? Madame Vastra and Jennie.
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Rosanne Welch, PhD
Rosanne Welch PhD teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.
Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.
Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.
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