Violent Femmes

The female spy has long exerted a strong grip on the popular imagination. With reference to popular fiction, film and television Violent Femmes examines the figure of the female spy as a nexus of contradictory ideas about femininity, power, sexuality and national identity. Fictional representations of women as spies have recurrently traced the dynamic of women's changing roles in British and American culture. Employing the central trope of women who work as spies, Rosie White examines cultural shifts during the twentieth century regarding the role of women in the professional workplace. Beginning with an examination of the male spy in popular fiction, White's revealing book then moves on to examine female spies, comparing and contrasting numerous female spies in investigative case studies with the aim of answering the following questions: How have depictions of the female spy changed over the twentieth century? What can Modesty Blaise tell us about women in the sixties and seventies? Does Alias offer an ideal vision of the working woman in the twenty-first century? Are women in western culture now seen as agents of their own futures? In the twentieth century, a period when women's relationship with public life and state authority was changing radically, the female spy in all her forms offers a suggestive account of the effects of, and resistances to, such transformations. Violent Femmes will examine the female spy as a figure in popular discourse which simultaneously conforms to cultural stereotypes and raises questions about women's roles in British and American culture, in terms of gender, sexuality and national identity. Immensely useful for a wide range of courses such as Film and Television Studies, English, Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Media Studies, Communications, and History, this book will appeal to students from undergraduate level upwards.