Abstract
This chapter re-reads Ian Fleming’s Bond books through the lens of feminist literary criticism to explore new perspectives beyond the representation of Bond’s unreconstructed views about women and feminism. This process reiterates something we already know: that reading is shaped by other ‘paratextual’ contexts, such as book covers, marketing and merchandising spinoffs, and emphasises the power of the interpellation of an implied male reader by these means. A feminist re-reading of Bond allows us to read the novels against the grain of these paratexts, reassess what makes a ‘man’ in Bond’s world and show how often the lines between masculinity and femininity are blurred. The numerous physical and psychological attacks on Bond’s manhood display a persistent philosophical anxiety about patriarchy, masculinity and moral justice.
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Notes
- 1.
‘What happens, therefore, when the filmist undertakes the adaptation of a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that he does not convert the novel at all. What he adapts is a kind of paraphrase … He looks not to the characters and incidents which have somehow detached from language and, like the heroes of folk legends, have achieved a mythic life of their own’ (Bluestone 1973: 62).
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Whelehan, I. (2018). Breaking Bond’s Balls: A Feminist Re-Reading Ian Fleming. In: Strong, J. (eds) James Bond Uncovered. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76123-7_6
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