ABSTRACT
Both Bill Potts from Doctor Who and Charlie Bradbury from Supernatural are iconic lesbian characters who have irreversibly changed the landscape of the long-running shows in which they are featured: the first queer character to appear on Doctor Who as a companion since Captain Jack Harkness, Bill Potts, is the show’s first lesbian character to feature in a starring role. Her story arc is bookended by her relationship with Heather, who is first encountered in Bill’s first episode on the series and who returns to save Bill’s life at the end of her time as the Doctor’s companion. Heather’s association with what appears to be water or oil—but is eventually revealed to be an alien life force resembling a liquid—is a significant factor in her transition from human to trans-human, and the elemental force that she becomes may be related to the transcendentalist roots of ecocritical discourse. Similarly, Charlie Bradbury’s role as the Queen of Moondor, a Live Action Role Playing arena, and her subsequent encounter with the faerie Gilda may be viewed in the context of the correlation of “geek” culture and the return to the natural, pre-industrial/pre-technological world of the episode “LARP and the Real Girl” (2013).
These analyses are examined through an ecofeminist lens that consists primarily of approaches to ecofeminism in the twenty-first century. As Greta Gaard observes in her 2011 essay “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” ecofeminism in the late twentieth century declined because of charges of gender essentialism. However, given the emergence of areas such as animal studies, vegan studies, and speciesism, ecocriticism has again risen to prominence in the field of gender studies, and perhaps one way of avoiding the charge of essentialism is to place ecofeminist criticism within the larger framework of questions relating to a pluralistic and queer sense of gender and sexual identities. In this, both Bill and Charlie lend themselves to interpretations based on emerging discourses in ecocritical queer studies.
