Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood's Yellow Peril and Its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema
- Chapter 2 Berlin – The City of Sound and Sensation in Fritz Lang's M and E. A. Dupont's Varieté
- Chapter 3 Bond's Body: Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale and the Future Anterior
- Chapter 4 Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
- Chapter 5 Imperial Gazes, Hollywood Predators: A Cinema of Molestation in Postcolonial Indian Literature
- Chapter 6 Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan's 1997 Trilogy
- Chapter 7 The Postnational and the Aesthetics of the Spectral: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon
- Chapter 8 The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality
- Chapter 9 Exploring In-humanity: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Still-Life Painting
- Chapter 10 Re-defining Art: Manuel Rivas' Mujer en el baño
- Chapter 11 Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker's Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Bond's Body: Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale and the Future Anterior
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood's Yellow Peril and Its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema
- Chapter 2 Berlin – The City of Sound and Sensation in Fritz Lang's M and E. A. Dupont's Varieté
- Chapter 3 Bond's Body: Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale and the Future Anterior
- Chapter 4 Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
- Chapter 5 Imperial Gazes, Hollywood Predators: A Cinema of Molestation in Postcolonial Indian Literature
- Chapter 6 Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan's 1997 Trilogy
- Chapter 7 The Postnational and the Aesthetics of the Spectral: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon
- Chapter 8 The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality
- Chapter 9 Exploring In-humanity: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Still-Life Painting
- Chapter 10 Re-defining Art: Manuel Rivas' Mujer en el baño
- Chapter 11 Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker's Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘It was a window into a queer world and into a queer business.’
—Ian Fleming, Live and Let DieA part of the formula of the Bond film franchise is that the hero has always made his way in the world by romancing beautiful women and defeating corrupt villains. Yet Bond's nominal heterosexual identity must always function in relation to the villain's ‘perversity’. Bond depends, that is, upon the villain's sexuality as a sort of negative definition of his own. Indeed, Bond's subjectivity is tainted both by his intimacy with the villain and his frequent cruelty to the ‘Bond girl’. This essay will examine the role of sex and sexuality during the years that Sean Connery starred as Bond (1962–1971) in order to track the complicated formula by which Bond is implicated in homosexual and sado-masochistic scenarios that arguably reach their most complex form in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Connery's last film with EON Productions, Diamonds, is unique in the Bond oeuvre by having as its villains, a gay male couple. The film is the first in the Bond franchise to deal directly with the threat to Bond's sexuality brought about by the Stonewall riots and the rise of a burgeoning gay-rights movement. While earlier Bond films frequently dealt with the threat of women's rights – most often in the form of a lesbian character (From Russia with Love, 1963, for example) – Diamonds Are Forever introduced the notion of gay male desire as a new reality for Bond and his future dealings.
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- World Cinema and the Visual Arts , pp. 41 - 58Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012