Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage

Spying Undercover(s)

Ann Rea

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350271364
• eBook ISBN: 9781350271388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An exploration of how espionage narratives give access to cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality before and following the Second World War, this book moves away from masculinist assumptions of the genre to offer an integrative survey of the sexualities on display from important characters across spy fiction. Topics covered include how authors mocked the traditional spy genre; James Bond as a symbol of pervasive British Superiority still anxious about masculinity; how older female spies act as queer figures that disturb the masculine mythology of the secret agent; and how the clandestine lives of agents described ways to encode queer communities under threat from fascism. Covering texts such as the Bond novels, John Le Carré's oeuvre (and their notable adaptations) and works by Helen MacInnes, Christopher Isherwood and Mick Herron, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage takes stock of spy fiction written by women, female protagonists written by men, and probes the representations of masculinity generated by male authors. Offering a counterpoint to a genre traditionally viewed as male-centric, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage proposes a revision of masculinity, femininity, queer identities and gendered concepts such as domesticity, and relates them to notions of nationality and the defence work conducted at crucial moments in history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Camp Camouflage: The Art of Espionage in Mr. Norris Changes Trains
• 2 Vanished Ladies: Helen MacInnes’s Above Suspicion and Women in Spy Fiction
• 3 Helen MacInnes’s While Still We Live: Gender, Secret Agents, and National Ethics
• 4 “Some Other Man Who Would Have to be Set Aside”: Burgess, Maclean, and the Adversarial Spy in Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love
• 5 Bond, Colonialism, and the “Other”
• 6 “Learn, Babies, Learn”: Race, Representation, and John Birch Society Activists Julia Brown and Lola Belle Holmes
• 7 “A New Class of Domesticity”: Home, Abroad, Foreignness, and Masculinity in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
• 8 A Queer Thing: The Older Woman Spy
• 9 “What’s the Character?”: Adapting Agency and Gender in The Little Drummer Girl
• 10 “Extolling the Virtues of Alpaca Cloth or Buttons Made of Tagua Nut”: The Influence of Douglas Hayward, Tailoring and James Bond on The Tailor of Panama
• 11 Darling Men, Lover Boys, and Rogues: Connie Sachs, Molly Doran, and the Precarity of Institutional Memory in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Mick Herron’s Dead Lions
• Coda: Stella Rimington: Open Secret and the “Mission to Inform”
• Index
• Copyright