Assuming everything goes according to the plan over the next month, I will receive my PhD in English effective February 1. My subdiscipline is rhetoric & composition, and my dissertation is about queer digital literacy practices, specifically bisexual literacies on TikTok circa 2020-2021.
I didn’t write it like a traditional dissertation. I often make light of the style, calling it “weird,” saying I “got away with” it. But I do this because I’m insecure that my friends and colleagues won’t take it seriously as real intellectual work, because it diverges significantly from the dissertations they are writing or have written. I figure that if I suggest to them that I don’t take it too seriously, I’ll shield myself from the chance that they don’t take it seriously either. And more than anything, I want to be taken seriously.
My dissertation uses a lot of multi-genre writing, drawing on Julie Jung’s idea of delayed convergence as a revision strategy —that is, switching between genres to intentionally create and leave open certain questions for the reader, in hopes that what happens in between will be generative. The style is also informed by M. Remi Yergeau’s book Authoring Autism, about how discourse around autistic people renders us lacking in ethos from the beginning — again, my deep fear of not being taken seriously. It’s partially a political polemic, calling for a return to Marxist politics within the U.S. queer movement, especially in the current legislative environment, for trans people in particular. It’s partially autoethnography, grappling with my own queer digital literacy journey as an early 2010s Tumblr kid, and thinking about how the cultural environment of bisexual TikTok is so different from what I remember twelve years ago — in a good way. It’s about the pandemic — because TikTok use in the U.S. exploded during the early months of Covid-19’s circulation in the United States, when so many people were learning and working from home. It’s the capstone of my degree, sure, but it’s also the capstone of questions I’ve been asking myself since high school, about my identity and my place within the world.
And so, at times, I take some time away from my main arguments and analyses to write about Doctor Who. It comes up in my discussion of fandom cultures and shipping, and it comes up in my discussion of my own experiences on Tumblr — before I was reblogging queer content, before I’d even come out to myself, I was posting about Doctor Who. But it also comes up in my own queer literacy narrative. Here’s a passage from the diss:
My partner and I recently started re-watching Doctor Who, from the beginning of the series reboot in 2005. When these episodes originally aired, we were ten, and closeted even to ourselves. We pause the episode often to discuss, as we watch with new eyes, queer eyes, eyes that have also seen Russell T. Davies’ more recent show It’s A Sin, a semi-autobiographical story about living as a young adult in Margaret Thatcher’s London. We realize, yes, the Doctor is queer, perhaps pansexual, emotionally unavailable, mostly celibate. We realize two episodes so far in season one explicitly mention trans people, in the future, in outer space. We’re watching this after Russel T. Davies has announced his return to the show, and we know that the new Doctor, with episodes airing nearly 20 years after the season we’re watching, will be played by a gay actor, and the next companion will be trans. My partner wonders if maybe Davies is saying, “you guys just didn’t get it the first time, did you?” We don’t dismiss the Master’s flirtations with the Doctor as a throwaway joke — he is flirting. They have history, the kind of deeply complex history that only two hundreds-of-years-old, friends-to-enemies, time traveling space aliens can have. I say I have a headcanon that the Master was the Doctor’s first sexual partner, but that the reverse isn’t true. We observe that while Rose and the Doctor aren’t sleeping together, they are nonetheless polyamorous partners. We reflect on Captain Jack Harkness, an unapologetically sexually fluid character, who is happy to explore intimacy with people of any gender or species. In a children’s show! He might be the first explicitly queer character I ever saw on TV or in a movie, and episodes of his spinoff show for adults, Torchwood, might be the first time I saw gay sex on TV. Doctor Who is wonderfully queer, no headcanons required, but we weren’t able to see it the first time. Because we had learned to disregard the explicit queerness as jokes, and assume that just as with everything else, we were just reading into it. Something inside me feels warm and happy, to revisit this show that I love, with a person I love, and watch it not as a weird nerd thing (okay, it’s still a weird nerd thing), but as a queer thing. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, and GAY.
As I was completing the final revisions before sending the "complete” draft off to my committee, something happened that was a big deal for Doctor Who fans: David Tennant returned to the show for three special episodes in honor of the show’s 60th anniversary alongside Catherine Tate, also marking the return of Russell T. Davies as showrunner. Tennant, known as the “tenth doctor,” would now also be the “fourteenth” — briefly, just for these episodes, until Ncuti Gatwa took over, the first Black and first openly queer actor to play the character.
Davies, it turns out, had been thinking about how to write for work as a queer person in the face of an overwhelming rise in transphobia in his country, too.
Catherine Tate’s character, Donna Noble, now has a teenage daughter, Rose, who is trans (played by Yasmin Finney). While Donna’s mother expresses uncertainty about how to talk about Rose, she saves these questions for Donna in private, so that Rose is spared from hearing them, and Donna firmly but warmly reminds her of what is appropriate. It’s a beautiful scene infused with love. Later, in a scene that was slightly more heavy-handed (but in a way I was happy to excuse, since Doctor Who is very often cheesy and/or heavy-handed), the Doctor refers to “the Meep” (an alien that looks like a Furby) as “he,” before Rose chastises him for “assuming the Meep’s pronouns.” Rather than getting defensive, the Doctor takes this in stride, quickly correcting himself and asking if the Meep is he, she, or they. (The Meep prefers to be referred to as “the Meep” instead of with a pronoun). Later in the episode, for reasons too complicated to get into here, nonbinariness as a concept — but Rose’s identity as a nonbinary trans girl in particular — saves the day.
It’s almost as if Davies is saying, “fuck all of you bigots, Doctor Who does in fact belong to the queers,” much as I feel like The Matrix: Resurrections is Lana Wachowski giving a big middle finger to the “red pill” contingent and saying “the Matrix belongs to trans lesbians first, all other queers second, and then everyone else.”
But this is not a one-and-done occasion for queer representation in the 60th anniversary celebration. In the second special episode, the Doctor and Donna briefly visit Isaac Newton. Afterwards, Donna asks, “Is it just me, or is Isaac Newton…hot?” and the Doctor replies, “Yeah. …really hot, actually. Oh, is that who I am now?” and Donna says, “It was always lurking under the surface, mate.”
On some level, it felt like RTD gave teenage me canonically bisexual David Tennant’s Doctor as a PhD present. As much as I enjoyed some aspects of fandom as a teenager, I was never into shipping or even fanfiction — it felt sacrilegious to the canon established by the creators. So this was not a moment of validation for my youthful imagination. But it nonetheless spoke deeply to my little teenage heart — that’s mine, that’s who I am, too. Growing up, as I think it is for many people, the fantasy was always what if someday the Doctor wants me to travel with him? But re-watching parts of the show this year brought me to a new, unexpected relationship with the character: in several episodes, he takes a job as a teacher. And I’m a teacher. And his teaching persona is perhaps a little closer to my teaching persona goals than I care to admit — I can’t pull off hypergenius time traveling space alien, and I think I don’t have quite the right gender expression for it either, but in my best moments, I maybe can pull off “a little too quirky, a little too enthusiastic, but charming and smart enough to pull it off” (it’s that autistic rizz, baby). And so the day after this second special aired, for the first time in a long time (but not the first time), I specifically tried (and failed) to do my hair like his before going into work. Not on that day, but on a different day, when I made a joke in my queer rhetoric class about the Doctor being teacher goals, a student told me that “queer studies professor and Doctor Who aren’t that far off in vibes,” which is perhaps my favorite compliment I’ve gotten from a student. (Bisexual literacy problems: when a particular incarnation of the Doctor is so formative to your taste in men, but also to your professional fashion sense goals, and your professional fashion sense says Lesbian, which is rhetorically the opposite of being perceived as liking any kind of men.)
But then came the third special episode. Neil Patrick Harris, playing a trickster god from another dimension, does a lipsync number to a Spice Girls song, and that isn’t even what I want to talk about here.
This episode introduces a new thing: bigeneration, where instead of a Time Lord regenerating from one form into another, he splits in two. (There’s also a hilarious bit of dialogue about whether bigeneration is a myth — not sure if the pun is intentional.) So for the last part of the episode, David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa are acting alongside one another. Gatwa’s Doctor tells Tennant’s Doctor that it’s time for him to stop traveling, rest, and process his trauma. He pulls him into his arms for a deep hug that’s so emotionally intimate I gasped as it happened. Tennant’s Doctor goes “home” to live with Donna and her family while he works on himself, while Gatwa’s Doctor hops into the TARDIS and, based on the preview of the Christmas special, which I haven’t watched yet, immediately hits the club.
I read this as a probably unintended scene about millennials (represented by Tennant) and Gen Z (represented by Gatwa). Gen Z says “ok millennials, you’ve had a good run, but you’re having a hard time, go home and go to therapy, it’s ok, we love you, but we’re having the adventures now.” And the final scene is a peaceful family dinner out on the patio — the weather is beautiful, all of the loved ones are there, Tennant’s Doctor is telling stories about his life.
And this is what I’m left with, having just completed a dissertation about queer literacies — a foundational piece of media from my own queer literacy history, newly imbued with bisexual millennial symbolism, embracing me, saying “it’s ok, you can rest.”
And of course, I can’t rest, I have a job, I have all of the political commitments I’m arguing for in the dissertation, and so on, but I can leave these issues — bisexual identity rhetorics, the role of this identity category in the LGBTQ+ community and in the queer liberation movement — to rest. I answered the questions that teenage me needed answers to. I’m ready to defend the dissertation, deposit it with the library, and be done.
It feels good. These anniversary specials brought me some unexpected, poetically appropriate catharsis, right as I’m transitioning away from being in school for my entire life and into the next, hopefully more stable, if I’m approved for my certificate of continuous employment three years from now, step.