Doctor Who Cosplayers
Feb. 25th, 2012 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foolish_m0rtalYou can disagree with me on this wholeheartedly.
I recently read an article called Gender-swapped Doctors. The article's cosplay pictures are really fantastic, but I think it tries to read way too much into cosplayer motivations. It talks about female cosplayers who dress up as the Doctor, and how this reflects their perceptions of the show and their disappointment in female characters in the show. While this is an interesting argument, it left me confused.
Maybe because I've cosplayed in the past, but gender lines in cosplay are pretty much non-existent. I like the Doctor character, so I dress up as him. If I wanted to dress up as Martha Jones or a dalek, I would do it because I find those characters interesting. There's no real gender crisis for me, and I'm confused why the writer of the article expects cosplayers to have these same crises. Some of the questions asked in the article were:
Why do so many women want to dress up as the Doctor, rather than his many companions?
Because it's a goddamn Doctor Who convention. I don't understand why the writer of the article expects female cosplayers to all dress up as companions. That takes all the fun out of cosplay. The Doctor is the main character, and I don't know why the writer thinks that female cosplayers would stay away from him just because he's played by a male actor. Also, genderqueer. Look it up. It's kind of a thing.
And why do they create such beautifully femme versions of the Time Lord's eccentric costumes?
There are all sorts of different interpretations of the Doctor's costumes. There are very few and visible fandoms that prize absolute accuracy of costume over inventiveness. I'm sure you can name a few. Sure, there are femme versions of the Doctor's costumes. There are also steampunk versions. I would love an article about that.
And most of all, why doesn't the Doctor look like this on television?
Not sure if a real question or just creepy.
I recently read an article called Gender-swapped Doctors. The article's cosplay pictures are really fantastic, but I think it tries to read way too much into cosplayer motivations. It talks about female cosplayers who dress up as the Doctor, and how this reflects their perceptions of the show and their disappointment in female characters in the show. While this is an interesting argument, it left me confused.
Maybe because I've cosplayed in the past, but gender lines in cosplay are pretty much non-existent. I like the Doctor character, so I dress up as him. If I wanted to dress up as Martha Jones or a dalek, I would do it because I find those characters interesting. There's no real gender crisis for me, and I'm confused why the writer of the article expects cosplayers to have these same crises. Some of the questions asked in the article were:
Why do so many women want to dress up as the Doctor, rather than his many companions?
Because it's a goddamn Doctor Who convention. I don't understand why the writer of the article expects female cosplayers to all dress up as companions. That takes all the fun out of cosplay. The Doctor is the main character, and I don't know why the writer thinks that female cosplayers would stay away from him just because he's played by a male actor. Also, genderqueer. Look it up. It's kind of a thing.
And why do they create such beautifully femme versions of the Time Lord's eccentric costumes?
There are all sorts of different interpretations of the Doctor's costumes. There are very few and visible fandoms that prize absolute accuracy of costume over inventiveness. I'm sure you can name a few. Sure, there are femme versions of the Doctor's costumes. There are also steampunk versions. I would love an article about that.
And most of all, why doesn't the Doctor look like this on television?
Not sure if a real question or just creepy.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-25 04:54 pm (UTC)If I was to dress up as Ten, it wouldn't be to make a political statement; it would be because he's my favorite character and having a vagina isn't going to stop me. o_'o
no subject
Date: 2012-02-26 09:56 am (UTC)A lot of those cosplayers are women, and, yes, sometimes those women dress up as male characters - but from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like there's any gender disappointment going on. Hell, half the women in male roles I've seen are part of a male-female pair of characters, because they and a friend wanted to do a themed cosplay. If that doesn't show they love the female characters as much as the male characters, I don't know what does.
Sometimes costume makes just get an awesome idea for a costume and it doesn't matter one whit whether they or the character are male or female or anything in between.
I guess that author is just getting hung up on the way Doctor Who is traditionally a male doctor with a female companion, and OMG isn't that sexist, and see, even the female fans dress up more as the doctor than their chromosome-sharing companions, surely they think it's sexist too...
Then again, I'd like to see the author write about the male Red Sonja cosplayer I spotted a few years ago, see what conclusions they can draw from that.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-26 04:49 pm (UTC)I completely agree with this.
That awkward moment when an article thinks it's being deep and sensitive... Then again, he based his article by talking to a few of the cosplayers. Maybe the questions he asked invited a certain kind of person to answer, and those are the few people who genuinely DO try to make statements? *shrug* I suppose the article was a nice try, but it was a bit off the mark.