‘Doctor Who’ is, and has Always Been, Camp
By Anne Gregg
Ncuti Gatwa is about to make history as the first openly queer actor to play the titular Doctor in Doctor Who. His run with Russell T. Davies as show-runner starts after three very queer specials featuring David Tennant as the 14th Doctor reunited with Donna Noble (Catherine Tate). The first of these specials features Donna’s transgender daughter Rose played by Yasmin Finney from Heartstopper. The day is saved by Rose existing beyond the binary of gender. The second episode has the Doctor confirm his attraction to men as well as women, and the third has Neil Patrick Harris doing a villain dance sequence to the Spice Girls. But Doctor Who has always been a little queer, not in terms of character or featured storyline.
I am not arguing that Doctor Who is a queer show. Instead, I argue that Doctor Who has always embraced queer aesthetics or, more specifically, Camp aesthetics. While camp can be made and enjoyed by anyone, camp is a queer aesthetic. It is wonderful to see Doctor Who embrace the queer community and feature more queer storylines talent, when we have embraced and loved Doctor Who and its campiness from its beginning.
Doctor Who is a fun sci-fi romp for the whole family drenched in camp. And queer people love camp. But what is camp? Why is it queer? And how is Doctor Who camp?
For a comprehensive definition of Camp, a great read is Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” For our purpose, I will break down a basic definition of camp: Camp is something so bad it’s good. For example, movies such as the E.T. ripoff Mac and Me and 80’s B-movie Sundown: The Vampire Retreat are camp because they are filled with cheesy effects, bad acting, and nonsensical scripts. The movies are unintentionally hilarious because they take the stupid parts seriously. The plots are ridiculous but only because they treat each element with sincerity. The alien Mac is never outwardly mocked. The script is not in on the joke.
Camp is not constrained to speculative genres. Mommie Dearest and Showgirls are more traditional queer camp classics. Both of the films feature over-the-top dramatics and center female characters who are performing femininity/sexuality, either out of delusion or in an incredibly unrealistic way. This is also why Drag is camp. Because it takes an ideal that people take seriously (gender) and turns it into an elaborate performance by mocking it. Drag complicates the definition of camp because drag performance makes the serious absurd, it mocks it. Camp is not only so bad it’s good, but it is also absurdity treated seriously, or serious things treated as absurd.
Doctor Who always treats its absurd world of time travel and space adventure with the utmost sincerity. Even when the CGI is bad, or when the villain is just a piece of skin, Doctor Who never breaks immersion in the middle of a fight with monsters to say, “Wow this is weird.” The threats are never laughed at. In fact, Doctor Who has some of the most campy villains of all time. because no matter how absurd the villain looks they are treated as world-ending threats. For example, two of Doctor Who’s most malicious villains are Daleks (robots with plungers) and cybermen (men in little metal suits with goofy smiles). All of the villains from the latest specials are incredibly camp. In the first special, the starbeast is a fluffy puppet that gains razor teeth. The villains in the second special are essentially David Tennant and Catherine Tate with odd limbs and razor teeth. In the third special Neil Patrick Harris is a toymaker with a comical German accent that exists outside the laws of reality. All of these villains are treated seriously within the narrative.
Doctor Who is well written and acted, but with effects and design it is almost always silly. When silliness is treated with abject horror, it becomes camp. Doctor Who is not a show about queerness, and it doesn’t need to be. Camp is often not about queerness, but it is adopted by queer people. Because it is excessive and it takes up space, because it is loud, and unapologetic, because it makes a joke out of sincerity.
Doctor Who has always been camp and it has been embraced and loved by queer people for its campy aesthetic, so it is exciting that the new era of Doctor Who is embracing us more than it ever has.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.
