7 - Femininity, Seriality and Collectivity: Rethinking the Bond Girl

Summary

Abstract

Bond Girls are often used to index fifty years of popular assumptions about feminism and femininity. This chapter considers how the Bond Girl's particular position as part of this collective moderates her individuality and limits her agency even as it imbues her with historical and historiographic value. I argue that the Bond Girl's collective identity is allied more to seriality, with its forward-looking regulation of femininity allied to replacement, atomization and substitution rather than the more utopian relational ideals of the female group linked to difference, possibility and growth. Drawing on selected films, reception and marketing discourse, I will trace how the Bond Girl's femininity is caught up in a serial identity that both flaunts and forecloses agency and possibility.

Keywords: Bond Girl; femininity; fashion; postfeminism; serial; female Group

Easily recognized and sometimes iconic, Bond Girls are used to index over fifty years of popular assumptions about feminism and femininity, spanning 1960's sex symbols, 1970's quasi-feminists and postfeminist sparring partners. Although individual Girls have come close to full narrative subjectivity— understood in the series and by its critics as parity with 007's professional expertise, control over space, activity and sexuality—Bond Girls’ serial quality positions them as second-class subjects. While Bond unifies different actors via a single, ever-developing, if discontinuous, identity that gives him an unusual capacity to adjust to social change and public taste, Bond Girls are usually contained within a single film, framed as creatures of their time with limited capacity to progress and develop. Moneypenny and, latterly, Judi Dench's M (1995-2012) remain franchise constants despite being played by different actors, but they bear a tenuous relationship to the Bond Girl—typically older, these long-term colleagues are not sexually involved with 007. Often defined in terms of their relationship to 007, Bond Girls also help define Bond: “The difference […] is that Bond is named, identified, singularized, whereas women remain generic, interchangeable, dependent” (Lindner 2015, xvii).

This chapter explores the Bond Girl's distinctive seriality, examining its vexed relationship to the collective identities and female connections central to femininity while considering the implications for feminism, female agency and popular feminine historiography.