Femininity, Seriality and Collectivity: Rethinking the Bond Girl

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.