Date of Award

2024

First Advisor

Brendan Mathews

Second Advisor

Daniel Giraldo-Wonders

Abstract

Doctor Who and its fandom have been locked in a game of tug-of-war over its authorship for the majority of its sixty-year history. Since as early as 1986, fans have taken on positions of authority in the series, often inserting fannish discourses into the text. To say that Doctor Who’s fans are its authors, to say that Doctor Who belongs solely to its fans, would be reductive but not entirely inaccurate. Often, fans are resistant to their own modes of fan-production appearing in the text, challenging the idea that fanfiction is inherently aspirational labor. Using a set of case studies from across the show’s history, including on-screen depictions of Doctor Who fans, fan responses to romance in the series, and fan speculation about the Doctor’s origins, I argue that the boundary between fan and author in the case of Doctor Who is malleable and permeable, but present and influential to the series development.

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