Glossary of terms

Although I have tried to avoid using academic language where there are everyday equivalents, there are a few terms and ideas which are very useful and I keep returning to.

Agency

A character has agency if they have the power to make decisions which affect the story. Bond and his villains typically have the most agency and the women or ‘girls’ have the least. It’s not something exclusive to Bond stories - most action narratives give the women very little to do, although this has changed over time. Some modern female characters have more agency but this is - alas - still far from always being the case.

Archetype

A very typical example of something. E.g. James Bond is an archetypal secret agent because he has many of the characteristics we associate with secret agents - spying, travelling the world, using disguises, etc.
See also Jung’s ideas about archetypes and Propp’s characters

Coded/coding

When a character exhibits stereotypical queer traits but it is never explicitly acknowledged that the character is queer, we say they have been ‘coded’ as queer. Coding is highly controversial. In cultures where queerness is subjected to censorship, it can be a way of sneaking queer representation past the censors. However, it is increasingly frustrating to many queer viewers who feel ‘baited’ by producers who aren’t brave enough to risk a dent in the box office by including anything more than tokenistic queer representation.

Freud

Sigmund Freud created the field of psychoanalysis and, although much of his work has been discredited since, many of his ideas have gained currency in wider society, even if we’re not consciously aware that they originated with Freud (NB: irony). Freud’s biggest idea was that the unconscious mind governs our behaviour more than we realise. Sometimes we do things and we don’t know why we’ve done them. This is highly relevant for the fictional character of James Bond: creative people make thousands of decisions to get their idea on the page or on film, not all of them consciously. Freud famously argued that you can interpret everything human beings do through the context of sexuality. Even apparently innocuous everyday objects can stand in for others, sometimes by way of compensation for something that we feel might be lacking in our lives. Perhaps most pertinently in the world of Bond, a gun is rarely ‘merely’ a gun. Freud even gets a shout out in the Madonna title song to Die Another Day.

Gaze

Literally what the camera is looking at. A filmmaker will have the choice of what to show and how much to show of it. In 1975, Laura Mulvey published a seminal paper in which she drew our attention to the fact that because most films are made by heterosexual men their camera will often linger on female bodies. Although filmmaking is starting to diversify, this is still the norm. It’s rare for men to be presented as sexual objects as frequently as women. To an extent, gaze is also in operation in text as well, the writer choosing which elements to focus the reader’s attention on.

Hypermasculinity

Many gay and bisexual men overcompensate for their perceived lack of masculinity by taking on ‘manly pursuits’ (such as sleeping with lots of women) to hypermasculine extremes, and not just in the bedroom. For instance, a 2012 study found that many gay and bisexual men spent a lot of time in the gym because they said it helped them to feel better for not being manly enough. Copious research has shown that gay and bisexual men are far more likely to suffer mental health problems as a result of feeling under pressure to behave in the ‘normal’ masculine ways. 

Jung/Jungian

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who thought that no human being is born as a ‘blank slate’. Instead, we all inherit a ‘collective unconscious’ containing all of our knowledge and experiences as a species. In other words, all of our ideas are already ‘out there’ somewhere - and they influence how we behave, for good or bad. He explained that all human beings are made up of four archetypes: the persona (how we present ourselves to the world); the shadow (the parts we hide from the world because they are socially unacceptable); the anima/animus (our true selves, which should be a mix of masculine and feminine if we want to be happy); the self (when we are fully conscious of who we really are and there is no mismatch with our unconscious thoughts and desires).  Jung also identified commonly occuring archetypes based on the roles people play in society. E.g. hero, maiden, father, mother, child, wise old man. These overlap usefully with Propp’s characters.

MacGuffin

An excuse for a plot. Usually an object used to propel a story along. Alfred Hitchcock used the term a lot in relation to his own spy thrillers. MacGuffins in Bond include stolen missiles, coding machines, superweapons, diamonds, rings etc.

Orientalism

In 1978, Edward Said wrote a book in which he explored the phenomenon of artists in the ‘west’ portraying people and cultures of the ‘east’, especially Arabic peoples. He called this Orientalism. Said was not necessarily saying that these portrayals were negative although, in reality, they are often distorted, exagerrated and highly stereotypical. Sometimes they are downright offensive. This is highly relevant to Bond, where the character travels the world and cultures are presented through his (or Fleming’s, or the filmmakers’) Western European eyes. For an accessible and entertaining introduction to Orientalism that is unafraid to dive into some of the complexities, I recommend this podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/forty-years-on-edward-saids-orientalism-still-groundbreaking/id151485663?i=1000454667385

Otherness

It’s human nature to define ourselves by what we are not. We have to fight our primal programming to see beyond the things which are different in other people so we can see that we probably have more in common. Sometimes we detect difference in surface things like people’s appearances and the way they sound. Other times it’s the way that people behave. Often, people who belong to one or more minority groups are positioned as ‘other’ to the ‘normal’ majority. People who are different races, who have different religions, sexual orientations, gender identities, disabilities. We are all ‘other’ to a greater or lesser degree. ‘Normal’ is relative. Although James Bond is usually positioned as ‘normal’ in the stories he is actually ‘other’ to many readers and viewers. Typically, the villains are the most ‘othered’ characters in Bond stories.

Propp’s characters

Vladimir Propp studied Russian folktales and found that particular character types keep reappearing. In most stories there was a villain, a dispatcher who sends a hero on the quest to defeat the villain, a princess or prize, a helper and so on. When his work was translated into English in 1958 it was found to apply to stories from most cultures. It certainly applies to James Bond. See also Jung’s archetypes.

Queer

The word queer, when used correctly, can be an empowering term which helps open up discussion and therefore foster greater understanding between people of different characteristics.

Unfortunately, queer was commonly used to attack the LGBTQ+ community until only very recently, and it still is at times. I remember being labelled ‘queer’ in the school playground and those negative associations are still with me. That’s part of the reason I want to reclaim the term and get people using it in the right way.

I’m not alone in this. Many younger LGBT people prefer the term queer because it doesn’t make them choose a particular box. It also carries a connotation of rebellion because of its history.

So queer can be used as a way of describing your identity.

It is also an academic term, one which has been used by academics for around four decades.

When the term queer is applied to a cultural text, such a book or film, it doesn’t have to refer to something that features explicitly (or even implicitly) lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex or asexual characters. An early pioneer of queer readings of films intended for consumption of non-queer people, Alexander Doty, argued that anything could be seen as queer. A queer book, film, video game, whatever is anything that challenges heteronormativity: the ideas, pervasive in many cultures, that the only normal or natural relationships are those between one man and one woman for the purposes of procreation; that gender is a binary (male/female). Queer texts present alternative possibilities to traditional narratives - you can’t be what you can’t see - helping people live more authentic, happier lives.

Doty says:

“I am aware of the current political controversy surrounding the word "queer." Some gays, lesbians, and bisexuals have expressed their inability to also identify with "queerness," as they feel the term has too long and too painful a history as a weapon of oppression and self-hate. … But the history of gay and lesbian cultures and politics has shown that there are many times and places where the theoretical can have real social impact. Enough lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and other queers taking and making enough of these moments can create a more consistent awareness within the general public of queer cultural and political spaces, as these theory-in-the-flesh moments are concerned with making what has been for the most part publicly invisible and silent visible and vocal.”

Sissy

A ‘sissy’ is an archetype dating back to the early days of cinema. Sissies were very effeminate gay characters who were rendered ‘safe’ by being desexualised. The sissy still finds his way into films to this day, often in the guise of Gay Best Friend characters who have no romantic lives of their own.

Sublimation/sublimated

Another psychological term used to describe what happens when socially undesirable behaviour (typically violence or sex) is redirected (transmuted) into an activity which is more socially acceptable. In works of art, something can be said to be sublimated when it is switched for something else. E.g. eating a large meal could stand in for a sex scene - both involve consumption of a kind. In Bond, a killing might stand in for sexual consummation (violence being more socially acceptable in cinema than sex, paradoxically!).