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the feminist librarian

the feminist librarian

Tag Archives: whoniverse

our bodies, ourselves @ forty (+ me!)

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in my historian hat

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Tags

being the change, gender and sexuality, history, human rights, the body, whoniverse

(photo by Hanna)

The feminist classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves, turns forty this year and has just been issued in a revised edition that was multiple years in the making. How do I know this? Because I got to be a part of the process! Long-time readers might remember when I posted a call for participants in the revision process back in January 2010. Well, in addition to broadcasting the call I also submitted my own name to the editors and was invited to join them in a virtual focus group discussion on intimate relationships. This conversation eventually turned into the “Relationships” chapter in the new edition, and many of the passages that didn’t make it into that chapter have been used in other sections — I found bits and pieces from my contributions in the chapters on sexual orientation and on sexuality, for example.*

my contributor’s copy, signed by the editorial team!
(photo by Hanna)

I don’t think I can adequately convey to you how proud I am to be a part of the OBOS project. My mother’s battered copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves was my constant companion through adolescence and, among other things, was my first exposure to explicitly feminist analysis, my first exposure to the idea of same-sex relationships, and my introduction to masturbation and how to do it. One of the first things I did when I moved out to Boston in 2007 was to visit the Schlesinger library at Radcliffe and browse the records of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective — the group that put together the first mimeographed edition of OBOS back in 1970. It’s an incredible honor to have had the opportunity to add my perspective to the myriad other voices that have been part of this international endeavor throughout the past forty years.

It’s so strange to see your own words on the printed page…

This past Saturday, women from around the globe gathered here at Boston University for a symposium in honor of the new edition. I wasn’t able to make the gathering because of a scheduling conflict (and, frankly, because it sounded like a long day with too many new people to make small talk with!) … but I’m looking forward to checking out the web video of the talks once those go up online. If/when they become available, I’ll be sure to post a link here!

Here’s hoping that OBOS (and I!) will be around in another forty years to celebrate eighty incredible years of women teaching and learning one another about their bodies, their sexuality, their relationships, their values, and their lives.

Update: Thanks to OBOS for mentioning this post in their introduction to the Relationships chapter online! Welcome to anyone who’s come to visit the feminist librarian via their link. You are most welcome.

*It’s standard OBOS practice to keep all of the in-text quotations anonymous in order to protect contributors’ privacy. For the “Relationships” chapter we all chose pseudonyms; if you know me and you care to figure it out you’ll be able to identify me through my bio at the beginning of the chapter.

multimedia monday: doctor who’s arctic adventure

22 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in media

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Tags

fun, web video, whoniverse

Via …fly over me, evil angel… via Neil Gaiman’s twitter feed.

sunday smut: much-delayed women of who no. 2

05 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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Tags

fun, movies, photos, whoniverse

I promised more Women of Dr. Who pictures a few weeks ago and then got busy with other things — plus Tumblr kinda failed me for a bit, not posting any inspiring stuff. But now I’m back with more lovelies for your Sunday viewing pleasure.



Leela (Louise Jameson)



Romana (Mary Tamm) with the Doctor (Tom Baker)
in The Armageddon Factor.



Rose (Billy Piper) in The Long Game.



Agatha Christie (Fanella Wollgar) in
“The Unicorn and the Wasp” (new series 4.7)
Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones)
and David Tennant (10th Dr.)
Jackie Tyler (Camille Coduri) and Mickey Smith (Noel Clarke) in
“Aliens of London” (new series 1.4)
Lucy Saxon (Alexandra Moen)
Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) from Torchwood
Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) with fiance Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill)
in “The Vampires of Venice” (new series 5.6)

All photos drawn from whoniverse, fuckyeahdrwho, karengillanlover, aimeesgonnaaim and whospam tumblr blogs.

You can see last week’s installment here.
I couldn’t find any satisfactory pictures of River Song … but the minute I do I’ll add them to the queue for the next installment.

Have a lovely Sunday … Hanna and I and a few of our fellow Whovians are off to the Brattle Theater in Cambridge tonight for a big-screen viewing of “The End of Time.” Hooray!

photo of the day: queen elizabeth + guns!

18 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in fandom

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

movies, whoniverse

I refuse to become one of those bloggers who constantly apologizes for the occasional radio silence … so I trust you all to understand it’s that time of the semester and chalk the lack of posts up to a busy work and academic schedule.

Meanwhile, I never followed through on my promise (threat?) to post more pictures of the women of Who last Friday. So in lieu of that, for now, some first impressions of the recently-released (here in the U.S. for those of us plebes who can’t afford BBC America) Season 5 of Dr. Who.  Hanna and I got the first disk in the mail and watched it last night.

(Hanna’s planning a post on these episodes next week: watch this space for a link)

Mild spoilers below for those who haven’t seen “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below.”

In short, my feelings are something like this:

Queen Elizabeth the Tenth (Sophie Okonedo), Starship UK
The Beast Below

Which definitely suggested to me that someone on the writing team had been watching this:

Zoe (Gina Torres), Firefly

Queen Elizabeth X was just maybe my favorite thing about the first two episodes.

Although I admit partly this is because I’m kinda waiting to get more of a feel for the Eleventh Doctor and his companion, Ms. Pond.

They seem to be trying to get around the breaking-in period with the new companion by doing a sort of time-traveler’s-wife number on her; not entirely sure how it’s working out, but it seems to have given her an edge in terms of not letting the Doctor bully her.

I’d love to see her and Donna work together (are you listening Mr. Moffett?), since I think Donna could offer her some advice on how to refine her instincts vis a vis the Doctor into something sharper and more effective.

Both episodes had lots of energy and I’m really liking the steampunk look of the repaired (regenerated? healed?) Tardis.

I felt like there was something essentially unsound about the premise of “The Beast Below” (5.2) but I have to think about it more before I can articulate it.Something flawed in the psychological manipulation in which only two choices are presented: to remember (and die) or forget (and comply). Particularly in the case of the Queen, who seems to have convinced herself she must perpetually forget and remember and forget and remember over and over again.

I’m also hazy on why the “beast” would eat those very adult citizens who chose to remember and protest. If it has enough agency to refuse to eat the children who have been chosen as sacrifices, why would it accept the very adult humans who could be its allies?

So yeah: I’m left with niggling questions.

But I’m a fan of the Queen … and her cape … and her guns.

friday fun: the women of who

05 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in media

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

movies, photos, tumblr, whoniverse


I promised you cat pictures this week and failed to deliver … but I have a half hour left here at the front desk of the MHS this rainy, windy, dreary Thursday afternoon and I decided to prepare some beautiful pictures courtesy of the whospam tumblr blog and whoniverse tumblr blog for your Friday edification and pleasure.

Mercy Hartigan (Dervla Kirwan) in The Next Doctor
the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his real-life daughter Georgia Moffett
who plays the titular character, Jenny, in The Doctor’s Daughter.
Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan) in Blink
Nancy (Florence Hoath) from The Doctor Dances
Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), Sarah Jane Adventures

Donna Noble (Catherine Tate)
Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), Torchwood

Obviously incomplete. Have any favorite gals I missed? Leave suggestions for next Friday in comments (and picture links if you have any particular images in mind!).

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everyone … enjoy your weekend!

memorial day must-see: doctor/donna

31 Monday May 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in fandom

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Tags

hanna, holidays, movies, web video, whoniverse

So I couldn’t quite make it the whole weekend blog-free after all.


For all you Dr. Who fans out there, Hanna chose to memorialize the doctor/donna this Memorial Day. Hop on over to …fly over me evil angel… for some fan video fun.

requiem to a companion: "don’t make me go back. please. don’t make me go back."

30 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in fandom

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

feminism, movies, whoniverse

Warning: SPOILERS.

This post is about the Dr. Who two-parter, “End of Time,” in which David Tennant finishes his tenure as the 10th Doctor. If you care about watching the episodes before reading what happens DO NOT READ FURTHER.

So I’m gonna be upfront here and say I’m a relative newcomer to the whole Dr. Who universe. For the perspective of a lifelong fan, I defer to Hanna’s own reactions to “End of Time,” “i don’t want to go,” posted over at …fly over me, evil angel…; I’m not gonna try to do the same level of analysis she does there — but there’s something (or, more specifically, someone) I really need to write about here.

And that’s Donna.

More specifically, it’s about how Donna needed to die.

Let me explain.

Donna is, hands-down, my favorite Dr. Who new-series companion. Not to diss Rose and Martha (both of whom I like for their own sakes), but from the minute Donna Noble appeared on the Tardis in “Runaway Bride” and slapped David Tennant’s Doctor upside the head for, well, being himself, I was sold. Donna is to the Doctor what you’d get if you crossed an exasperated big sister (“bite me, alien boy“) with an adoring niece who’s favorite Uncle had just given her the opportunity to walk away from her infantalized existence (trapped in dead-end temp jobs, dominated by her demanding, unhappy mother) and take on the universe.

After the Doctor rescues her from a wedding gone wrong in “The Runaway Bride,” Donna packs the boot of her car packed in readiness for interstellar space/time travel and seeks out the Doctor by following suspicious, potentially alien activity, in hopes that she can reinvent herself as his companion.

By mutual agreement, theirs is not a romantic or sexual relationship. Though there is, by the end of Donna’s tenure, a deep, deep love that would have been believable (at least in my mind) as sexual intimacy if the writers had chosen to take it in that direction. But they didn’t and it worked just as well (possibly better) without the simmering sexual tension that is at present an over-used trope in television serials. The relationship between Donna and the Doctor was on some level unequal (which is where the “cool uncle” part comes in; he’s a nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord, for goodness’ sake!) while also being entirely egalitarian (big sister who doesn’t take any crap from her little bro).

And I also think that, more than either of the companions immediately preceding her, Donna was unequivocal about the fact that joining the Doctor on the Tardis was her decision from the start. And one about which she had no second thoughts. Possibly this is because when we meet Donna she is older than both Martha and Rose, both more certain of who she is and wants to be in the world and also restless, full of unrealized potential. She’s ready for a challenge, and realizes it. Which is why she packs that suitcase and goes looking for her spaceman.

So on the one hand, it’s completely understandable, given this love between them, that the Doctor — faced with Donna’s imminent death as the result of a human-time lord meta-crisis (no, I’m not exactly sure either) which saved the universe from invasion by Daleks — makes a quite human mistake. Given the choice of either allowing Donna to die with dignity — in full knowledge of who she is and the choices she has made — or “saving” her by wiping her memory, the Doctor chooses to put her on the Time Lord equivalent of life support, a medically-induced coma, if you will. She becomes a shell of her former self, with no memory of the life she had in which she was a Self with agency: in which she acted in the world.

What the Doctor did to her, even in the name of salvaging her physical existence, was a violation. In writing this post I sat down and watched the scene in “Journey’s End” where the Doctor erases Donna’s memory. She tells him no. Repeatedly. “Don’t make me go back,” she pleads with him, “please, don’t make me go back.” And he does it anyway.

This is NOT OKAY. Understandable, maybe, in a broken, human, bad-decision-in-a-time-of-crisis sort of way. But NOT. OKAY.

So when it became clear that Donna re-appeared in the “End of Time” two-parter, both Hanna and I were hopeful that the writers had realized the error of their ways and were going to, finally, screw up the courage to do what they’d failed to do in the first instance, and that was let Donna die. After all: for all intents and purposes, she had died already — as both Donna’s grandfather and the Doctor acknowledge in the opening scenes of “End of Time.” As Hanna writes,

bernard cribbins does a(nother) great turn [in “End of Time”] as donna’s grandfather, really providing the companion for the show and doing a fantastic job at it, too, keen to see the doctor again, eager to help, but also desperate to understand why the doctor abandoned donna and why the doctor, seemingly so lonely and at loose ends, won’t just take donna back travelling with him.

Suffice to say, we were desperate to have Donna return to herself (please please please!) and die (in some sort of meta-crisis crisis that would have, in turn, caused the Doctor to regenerate, mayhap?) in what would have been restitution: the knowing death she was asking for at the end of “Journey’s End,” which the Doctor denied her.

But no.

What we had to watch was not-alive Donna getting married in what Hanna and I swear was the same fucking wedding dress the Doctor had rescued her from in “The Runaway Bride.” On the surface happy, but visibly confused, slightly vacant, entirely absent in a performance that must have been the devil for Catherine Tate to play.

Let me repeat. The “happy” ending is the one that puts our heroine back where she was on day one, with no memory of the life-changing experiences she’s had.

The attitude of the writers, it seems to me, is neatly summed up in this ninety-second recap of “the Donna Noble story”:

So . . . Donna gets to go “happily” back to her pre-Tardis existence after being the most important-fucking-woman in the universe with absolutely no memory of the experience . . . and the character we’re supposed to feel sorry for is the Doctor who (boo hoo) has to spend his Christmas alone?

Sorry. Not buying it.

Possibly I have a little issue with memory wipes.

Call me crazy.

I find myself wondering: Did no one on the writing team see this? Did no one realize that for those of us who care about Donna, the End of Time was basically two hours of watching our wonderful, vibrant, life-filled Donna Noble suffocate to death in the life she never wanted in the first place? That we could see that haunted, bewildered look in the back of her eyes in every frame? That having to sit through the “happy ending” that saw her married to a stranger while her grandfather looked sadly on and the Doctor blessed the union and walked away was roughly the equivalent of driving red hot nails through the center of our eyeballs?

While I don’t agree with everything author Philip Pullman writes, I’m a longtime fan of his Sally Lockhart novels, a young adult series in which one of the major characters dies in the second book. I once read an essay (I’m sorry I can’t track it down!) in which he reflected on the decision to kill the character. In earlier drafts, he acknowledged, he hadn’t had the guts to do it, merely causing the character disfigurement. But a friend told him the character had to die.

Because people die. Good people die. And if fiction doesn’t deal with the death of people who we wish didn’t die, it’s not true.

And you end up writing a poorer story.

You end up doing more violence to your characters than you would have if you’d let them be true to themselves — even to the death.

Donna should have died. And Doctor Who was less true, as a piece of fiction, because she lived.

It’s going to be a while before I’ll be able to think about forgiving that.

And I’ll sure as hell never be able to forget it.

from the neighborhood: donna the christmas angel

09 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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Tags

domesticity, photos, web video, whoniverse

She first appeared as the titular Runaway Bride in the 2006 Dr. Who Christmas special, so who better to top our tree this Christmas than Donna Noble (played by the aforementioned awesome Catherine Tate)?

And just in case you’re up for a little Donna nostalgia I bring you (via Hanna, who posted it first at …fly over me evil angel…) an awesome fan video.

"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue

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