Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Becoming Honey Ryder – the visual politics informing the first Bond Girl

2017; Intellect; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1386/jepc.8.1.5_1

2040-6142

Boel Ulfsdotter,

Law in Society and Culture

This comparative study focuses especially on the prior visual representation of the first Bond Girl, Honeychile Rider, in comic strip form in the Daily Express in 1960, and aims to negotiate how the visual politics of her screen character was mediated through and influenced by this and other earlier iterations of James Bond’s female companions in popular printed media. I also problematize the claims that the pornographic influences on the visual politics imbuing these images result from Fleming’s graphic writing. In this way, I have accomplished three things: to locate graphical reiterations (texts) of James Bond’s female companions that can act as a possible matrix to future studies of them; to introduce a more nuanced and complex view of the development of the Bond Girl prior to the first Bond film; and to critically investigate the random and often simplified use of the notion of pornography in relation to studies of the Bond Girl.