I do have issues with Who as Middle Class Able Bodied White Man Saves The Day; but only in the same way that all of mainstream western culture is focused through that lens, and that while you can see it as a parable for queerness and neuroatypicality, we still have to see that parabel through the focus of a Middle Class etc Man. (I have the similar issues with Simon and River Tam in Firefly - I didn't see the lack of Chinese people in the Firefly universe until it was quite strongly pointed out to me, cos I read Simon and River as Chinese. Except for that part where actually, they're not).
And I know what you mean about sexuality being more visible making it harder to read stuff queer. A lot of people fall for the phalacy (can't spell that word - falsehood, anyway) where characters are heterosexual until proven gay. In Torchwood, where some characters DO "prove" themselves "gay", it makes questions of sexuality much easier to dismiss. Moffat won't give him boyplots, I don't think, because it's pre-watershed, and they can do that on Torchwood, now.
I've been having thinky thoughts about representation queer, recently, which go like this - I thought it would get better in the (british) media once the civil rights legislation came through because it gave gay people a narrative structure that wasn't tragedy. I'd bargained without the fact that queer content gets given higher ratings, so the narratives STILL tend towards tragedy. Anyway. Way off topic. Rambling dinstinctly. But; yes. This is all interesting.
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I do have issues with Who as Middle Class Able Bodied White Man Saves The Day; but only in the same way that all of mainstream western culture is focused through that lens, and that while you can see it as a parable for queerness and neuroatypicality, we still have to see that parabel through the focus of a Middle Class etc Man. (I have the similar issues with Simon and River Tam in Firefly - I didn't see the lack of Chinese people in the Firefly universe until it was quite strongly pointed out to me, cos I read Simon and River as Chinese. Except for that part where actually, they're not).
And I know what you mean about sexuality being more visible making it harder to read stuff queer. A lot of people fall for the phalacy (can't spell that word - falsehood, anyway) where characters are heterosexual until proven gay. In Torchwood, where some characters DO "prove" themselves "gay", it makes questions of sexuality much easier to dismiss. Moffat won't give him boyplots, I don't think, because it's pre-watershed, and they can do that on Torchwood, now.
I've been having thinky thoughts about representation queer, recently, which go like this - I thought it would get better in the (british) media once the civil rights legislation came through because it gave gay people a narrative structure that wasn't tragedy. I'd bargained without the fact that queer content gets given higher ratings, so the narratives STILL tend towards tragedy. Anyway. Way off topic. Rambling dinstinctly. But; yes. This is all interesting.