Materialising Meaning(s): Fans, Fashions and the Twelfth Doctor

‘Kidneys… I’ve got new kidneys. I don’t like the colour.’ So says the regenerated Doctor at the climax to Season 7. While he was necessarily frugal with his words, his wardrobe, revealed by the BBC just a month later, was somewhat more voluble. Costume is a ‘speech act’ (Austin 1962, Derrida 1988 and Butler 1990) a ‘declaratory’ mark that here announces Peter Capaldi’s Doctor so far ahead of Season 8 we must assume the mark to exemplify Derrida’s notion of différance(1988), to profit, that is, from the discursive hiatus between authorship and reception. This paper examines the Doctor’s costume as having to speak across this gap via divergent systems of meaning production, from authorship through to appropriation by fans and consumers, and finally as feedback to the official producer. I draw on relationships between fan creativity and the bricoleur writing of both the classic and new series, acknowledging the significance of the programme reliance on intertextuality and the transmedia setting. These are not only useful storytelling strategies, they are also a challenge to the notion of ‘the author,’ one who has original thoughts which then trickle-down to the audience, as well as being amenable to the notion of audience agency, from whom ideas might plausibly bubble-up or trickle-across (see King, 1963). [...] The vulnerability of the mark is both a performative opportunity for fans, consumers and cos-players, and a potentially productive one in terms of the programme and franchise