![](\"http:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/30\/2017\/07\/jodie_doctor_who.jpg\")
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“Twitter claimed that \u2018a woman can\u2019t be a Doctor\u2019 and \u2018it is not Nurse Who, but Doctor Who\u2019”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
By Finola Kerrigan<\/a>,\u00a0Reader in Marketing and Consumption at Birmingham Business School<\/strong><\/p>\n
Doctor Who fans waited with great excitement to find out who the thirteenth Doctor would be.\u00a0 This long running, rebooted series has an inbuilt mechanism to deal with the problem facing many long running series, how do you sustain the series over time, when your lead actor ages or wants to move on to other things? The Doctor metamorphoses into a new body when the body is depleted. Even the Doctor does not know what form his next incarnation will take until it happens.<\/p>\n
Up to now, the Doctor was a white man, but the thirteenth Doctor is a woman; Jodie Whittaker.\u00a0 This announcement has been met with the now expected outcry from some fans, declaring this casting as a crime against the show and framing the decision as part of a lefty agenda within the BBC.\u00a0 Objections on Twitter claimed that \u2018a woman can\u2019t be a Doctor\u2019 and \u2018it is not Nurse Who, but Doctor Who\u2019, showing that old gender stereotypes still persist. While women appeared in Doctor Who, up until now, the most prominent women acted as the Doctor\u2019s assistant.<\/p>\n
Could the next James Bond be a woman?<\/h2>\n
Some outraged fans linked the casting of Whittaker to speculation that the next James Bond could be a woman, something that has been discussed at great length in research that I have been doing with Chloe Preece from Royal Holloway, University of London and Daragh O\u2019Reilly from University of Sheffield on the James Bond franchise. In our research, fans retain very clear ideas regarding who should play Bond and why.<\/p>\n
Bond purists insist that the Bond conceived of by Ian Fleming was dark haired, therefore the most recent Bond, the blonde Daniel Craig, cannot be seen as an authentic Bond.\u00a0 For others, they will accept a change of hair colour, but deviations in relation to gender or skin colour are out of the question.\u00a0 In contrast, Doctor Who has no predetermined race or gender, but the character just happened to be played by white men up until now. In response to the outcry that Doctor Who cannot be a woman, the Merriam-Webster dictionary tweeted \u201c\u2018Doctor\u2019 has no gender in English\u201d.<\/p>\n
Diversifying casting for our screens<\/h2>\n
This negative reaction to the casting of a woman as Doctor Who is not surprising when set in the context of expressions of cultural tastes more broadly.\u00a0 Research I undertook while writing my recent book, Film Marketing<\/a>,\u00a0found a clear gender bias in online reviewing.\u00a0 Walt Hickey\u00a0found that TV shows aimed at women were routinely rated poorly<\/a> by male reviewers on peer review platforms such as IMDB.\u00a0 Equally, a study by Jahna Otterbacher<\/a> found that reviews written by, or perceived to be written by woman were downgraded in terms of usefulness by platform users. What we see is that the entertainment medium can be slow to catch up with social norms, where women occupy all sorts of roles in society.<\/p>\n
Researchers have long pointed out the problems with a lack of diverse representation on screens; the stories on screen do not represent everyday reality and in not doing so, this lack of representation can have broader negative implications.\u00a0 While the focus of the casting of Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Who is on gender, broader attention needs to be paid to normalizing diverse casting across the board so that our screens reflect society more accurately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Twitter claimed that \u2018a woman can\u2019t be a Doctor\u2019 and \u2018it is not Nurse Who, but Doctor Who\u2019” By Finola Kerrigan,\u00a0Reader in Marketing and Consumption at Birmingham Business School Doctor Who fans waited with great excitement to find out who the thirteenth Doctor would be.\u00a0 This long running, rebooted series has an inbuilt mechanism to … Continue reading “Why all the fuss? It\u2019s about time, lord”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,78,1],"tags":[82,79,21,81,80],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gender","category-media","category-uncategorized","tag-diversity","tag-doctor-who","tag-gender-equality","tag-gender-stereotyping","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/business-school\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}