NEW EPISODE: The Bendy Straw of Borusa (The Invasion of Time)
Another month, another Gallifreyan diva to become obsessed with. After watching "The Invasion of Time," we discuss the sinister and obsequio
Another month, another Gallifreyan diva to become obsessed with. After watching "The Invasion of Time," we discuss the sinister and obsequious Castellan Kelner, women, Gallifreyan Taskmaster, and how horrible the chancellery guard are at their jobs.
Music by @elijahharpermusic
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look i don't expect marc platt circa 1988-1997 to have been reading much feminist theory but the nonsense regarding women in lungbarrow continues to vex me. a society that has abolished sexual reproduction but not gender or gendered labor (sure) in which women are still subjugated primarily as domestic laborers (okay where are we going with this) but recently have been organizing and taking positions of political power (#girlbosses) with the aim of BRINGING BACK SEXUAL REPRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTIVE LABOR, as a Women's Rights position (what), and will specifically be using a racialized and perpetually Othered woman as the First New Mother (which is not a loaded position re:the surrogacy industry at all). what does it all mean. marc come back i have questions.
Gallifreyan women were inventing mumsnet before they even reinvented mothers. I don’t care about the Divine Pythian Feminine does anyone raised on this planet of Rationalists know what pregnancy does to the body even remotely
Like this position only makes sense if you’re absolutely sloshed off the cispatriarchal kool aid and can only conceive of women when they have the Divine Ability To Give Birth, and therefore a society with no Mothers leaves women as an ontological category Endangered. The reason Romana is framed as a radical advocate for Women is that in the ideology this book is swimming in women cannot exist if they aren’t mothers, so bringing back motherhood is bringing back the True role of women in this society. It’s so bleak. Marc I just want to talk.
people rightfully meme on Paul Jerricho's delivery of "no not the mind probe" but frankly I think it's been overshadowing the rest of the hilariously baffling choices he makes in the rest of The Five Doctors
More kind of embarrassing confessions from a lifelong Doctor Who fan
When I was very, very young, I used to think Whoville (like. The location in How The Grinch Stole Christmas) and Gallifrey were like...related? It's hard to explain now, but I was, like, a baby, so whatever.
Anyway, all I remember is that I watched The Grinch one year and heard about the Whos that live in Whoville, and it made perfect sense to me that my best friend my main squishy the ultimate character of all time, aka Dr. Who themself, was one of the Whos that lived in Whoville.
Mind you, I don't think I had watched far enough into the show at this point (I was really young, idk exactly how old though) to actually know the Doctor's planet was named Gallifrey, so I thought Whoville was an appropriate substitute. Because I was a toddler.
no actually I'm insane about the canon implication that the rani has respiratory issues ... if rtd wasn't a coward he would've had her cut herself off in the middle of her big expositiony monologue to puff on an inhaler
*chronic-fatigues your doctor*..... i was so fascinated with seeing a doctor in a wheelchair in the zero room story arc.... i loved that he struggled with excessive fatigue after his regeneration and couldn't get around for a while. it was interesting....5th doctor you are an ambulatory wheelchair user... in my mind.
if someone just introduced rassilon to r/worldbuilding a lot of things could have been avoided. unfortunately reddit had not been invented yet so the og worldbuilding nerd had to like, actually rewrite the actual universe instead
[this is the revised and expanded version of some rambling i initially did in my cowriter's discord DMs. i tried cite sources where i could, but a lot of this has been marinating in my brain since half-absorbing posts twenty pages deep into peoples' dw tags 3 years ago, and also i spend way too much time on the wiki, so please excuse anything i can't quite source, which is most of it. huge thanks to @oriigami for being my original conversation partner and contributing extremely to the concepts here, and to @bird-of-paradox and @waywren, neither of whom I am being allowed to @, for bothering me into not leaving it as unreadable discord screenshots]
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There's this tendency among queer Doctor Who fans to look at Time Lord society, with its alienness and regeneration, and ask, frustrated, "Why do they even have gender?"
I sympathize with this extremely. I've been the one asking this question plenty in the past, and I do think it's a bit silly, and even sillier that the genders are "man" and "woman" and there are apparently two of them. But I also think that the section of canon most insistent about the Gallifreyan gender binary, the 7th Doctor novels from the 90s, also has the potential to be the most interesting about it.
Now, this is not to say that the text of those novels isn't weird about gender in a flawed, written by (as far as I know) cis people in the 90s way. But I think that you can extrapolate and queer what's there in very interesting ways, often because it's so flawed in the first place: Gallifrey, too, is an extremely flawed society. Decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core, as the show put it.
So, VNAs Gallifrey: living Houses and their female Housekeepers, cultural and literal planet-wide sterility, Loom birth, rigid overcomplicated bureaucracy, the enduring legacy of the pre-Rassilon Pythian regime. The gender binary as presented here goes something like
women: chaos/magic/psychic powers/superstition/the house (scary)/biological childbirth/fertility
men: cold rationality/order/science/bureaucracy/loom-birth/sterility
The Pythia and the Lord President. Magic and science. The House and the Web of Time.
Obviously a lot of this is classic gender binary stuff. But let's put the exasperated question of "Why must we do the gender binary like this?" aside for a moment and think about Gallifreyan society instead.
Pythia-ruled and Time Lord-ruled Gallifrey have a lot of the same problems in the end, just wearing different faces: they're both very much totalitarian states that believe themselves to be above everyone else. But while the Time Lords observe and micromanage the Web of Time from their Panopticon, maintaining its integrity to their standards, the Pythians didn't have time travel, so this preoccupation with control manifested--as far as I know; this is the bit in the meta where I admit I haven't actually read Time's Crucible yet--as keeping the entirety of society in one psychic hivemind, leaving nobody any privacy, plus a lot of future-reading and prophecy and whatnot.
The main relics of that societal layout into post-Rassilon Gallifreyan society are the Matrix, which has every single dead Time Lord's brain in it and does their prophecies for them, just couched in a little bit more science than Pythian magic, the Houses, which are alive all around you and in which you're constantly being watched by the Housekeeper through her mirrors, and, of course, the gender binary.
The Pythia was always a woman. Women were the ones with vast psychic powers, with magic; women were the ones in charge. Pythian Gallifrey was a heavily gendered society. This is because Gallifreyans are a kind of bug /shot with the "irrelevant to the point at hand" gun.
And so, when Rassilon rebelled, he was very much playing the part of "opposite gender with opposite worldview." The Pythia had female magic and superstition; he had male science and technology. His most trusted Founders were either all or mostly men, depending on the version of events you prefer. (Personally I have my doubts about the Other.) Rassilon built his new society as a man, among men, in opposition to the matriarchs before him.
Gallifrey, despite the invention (or theft, depending on the story) of regeneration allowing people to trans their gender randomly and sometimes unintentionally, never left the gender binary behind.
The whole point of modern Gallifreyan society is that they're still stuck in that exact same moment Rassilon took over (and the Pythia cursed them to sterility, if thats the version you're going with). You could easily make an argument for this being some cycle of abuse type situation; Rassilon and co overthrew the Pythia and immediately did exactly what she was doing to them to the wider universe. I tend to read it as a regeneration: it's the same society, really. It just died and was reborn, and now it looks and sounds different.
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The downside of trying to translate a discord conversation into a proper meta post is that sometimes making a coherent transition between thoughts is impossible. So to introduce the next bit of this post, I'm going to hand you off for a moment to this post about the 8th Doctor's "I'm not sure I've ever even been a man" quote from Interference. As op of that post says, the Doctor is genderqueer even by Gallifreyan standards- he's being questioned in that scene by another Gallifreyan, who doesn't understand his experience of gender.
The EDAs are full of "Eight is nonbinary" quotes, of course. Every queer fan who's ever engaged with them has a collection (and if anyone knows where that one google doc compilation that was going around awhile back went I'd be in your debt, because I'd love to know if my collection is missing any), but almost all those quotes refer to his genderqueerness in human terms, as observed by human companions, or in response to human assumptions. Except that one. Not only is Gallifrey's gender binary alive and well in a society where people can literally change their gender when they die, but the Doctor doesn't fit inside it.
All this to say that being a renegade Time Lord is a nonbinary thing to do. Especially the Doctor, with all sorts of weird Other Timeless nonsense in their biodata. Women stay on Gallifrey (or Karn!) and do magic and watch you. Men stay on Gallifrey and do science and watch other people. Renegades go out and do whatever they please. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
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So. Gallifrey has a gender binary. It's vestigial, a remnant of an earlier iteration of society with a much sharper male-female divide, and it doesn't make logical sense for it to exist. So: How does it manifest? And what function does its continued existence serve in the interests of the status quo and ruling class?
Let's take a look at 7th Doctor novel Lungbarrow.
Lungbarrow introduces us to (among many other things) the living Houses of the Time Lord Families, and to the family structures within: the patriarchal figure of the Kithriarch, the always-female Housekeeper, bound in her ritual marriage to the House itself, and hordes of petty squabbling Cousins.
Kithriarch is already an interesting title. It's obviously a gender neutral version of matriarch or patriarch, but the role itself seems to be almost entirely a male sort of thing in opposition to the feminine Housekeeper.
The Housekeeper, meanwhile, seems to be in a direct conceptual and societal line of descent from the Pythian priestesses: she can see anything within her domain, she has a psychic connection to the House, from whom she cannot hide anything, she can command the wooden Drudge servants and other House subsystems, she prioritizes the House above all where the Kithriarch is supposed to prioritize the Family. Women are frightening and powerful psychics. They know everything you want to keep secret, and prioritize the collective.
(There's also something here about how Lungbarrow presents duelling dualities--the Doctor and the Master, the CIA head and the Lord President, the Kithriarch and the Housekeeper, the masculine and the feminine--but I haven't quite tied it into the rest of this yet.) (Although while we're mentioning the Master. He's girlcoded by Gallifreyan standards and the Rani is boycoded by the same. I will not be expanding on this at this time just trust me.)
I think Housekeepers and women who want to be Housekeepers try to keep their self-image as women strong enough that they never regenerate into a male body (whatever a '"male body" means, of course, but I'm not sure Time Lords have gotten that far in their queer theory yet). I also think that there are more female Kithriarchs than male Housekeepers, because Housekeeper is much more heavily ritualized role in keeping with the Pythia's more ritualized general vibe, but I do think female Kithriarchs are still few and far between.
I also think that these are probably the most explicitly gendered occupations on Gallifrey, although of course you'll see some drift. Most women are out there getting the same scientific, military, and bureaucratic positions as men. But there's this lingering specter of gender roles, a Pythia-shaped hole that exists around the concept of womanhood. As my cowriter put it when we were talking about this, an "ideal of womanhood. not ‘ideal’ as in desirable, [but] ‘ideal’ as in the quintessential image of the thing."
This is further amplified by the continued existence of the Pythians in the form of the Sisterhood of Karn, living in their perfectly functional all-women magic society just out of sight. Their presence at the edge of the Gallifreyan consciousness must haunt the Time Lords, as any imperialist power is haunted by its own past and its own ultimate impotence.
Because that's the other thing. Gender roles are, to quote my cowriter again, "stupid and antiquated and historically potent tools of authoritarianism." Of course the Time Lords have them. Have you seen them?
They're tools of control, of conformity, of idealizing the past. Of conservatism. Consider, to once more quote my cowriter, "the weird traditionalist psychosis of having gender roles in a society that can’t bear children."
The ideal woman on Gallifrey is still the Pythia, millenia or even billenia on. And the ideal man is still the Lord President Rassilon.
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[thank you for your time! if you liked this please consider checking out my fic Something Old, which is about lungbarrow, the adventuress of henrietta street, and the gallifreyan concept of marriage, and in the writing of which i initially articulated most of the thoughts in this post. i've previously characterized it as a fic that's actually a meta post. and please don't be too mean to me for anything i got wrong in here! i'm just a little guy]
