Do it yourself: women, fanzines, and Doctor Who
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| Academic Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Do it yourself: women, fanzines, and Doctor Who |
| Commentator: | LG McMurtry |
| Date(s): | 2013 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Doctor Who |
| External Links: | http://usir.salford.ac.uk/44363/ (free PDF download) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Do it yourself: women, fanzines, and Doctor Who is an essay by LG McMurtry, a Doctor Who fanzine editor and publisher. It was referenced in references in the Atlantic article about how fanzines influenced the second generation of Doctor Who writers and producers. [1]
Excerpt:
It is a pervasive fallacy that fanzines (that is, fan magazines) arrived on the scene in the late 1970s with the punk movement. Yet, Frederic Wertham has traced them back as far as 1930. As fanzines ‘in their most basic form, require only paper writing implements, and elementary compositional skills’, girls have self-published fan magazines since the 1930s, as
Mary Celeste Kearney pointed out in her book Girls Make Media.
American fanzines were often twice as long as British ones, and virtually every NorthAmerican fanzine title from the 1980s was edited by a woman, with art and fiction providedby both sexes. Paulie Gilmore, editor of Jelly Baby Chronicles from 1983, did much of herown artwork and fiction-writing as well as contributing to other zines; issue three from 1984featured a portfolio from Cheryl Whitfield Duval, who edited two fanzines of her own, TimeLog and Rassilon’s Star, and published a vast quantity of art and writing in other titles.. Meanwhile, in Australia, a similar gender parity was at work, with Sarah Prefect joking in1985 that she would trigger a mass wave of immigration when she announced that themale:female ratio of fans aged fifteen to 25 was almost 1:1.
Whether at the forefront or the fringes, whether hidden by a mirage of ‘those limp, greasy-haired young men’ as Brigid Cherry called them in 1989, or providing covers, editing, and writing for a fanzine, female Doctor Who fanzine participants are present. Stanish has repeatedly likened the way boys approach sci fi to baseball statistics. As for the girls, she says in Enlightenment 135, ‘they may be looking for something different in the show . . . but they are just as committed’