Honeytrap Lies and Women Spies

By Rosie White, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted November 21, 2008.

British intelligence has now had two female directors: Dame Stella Rimington, who was head of MI5 from 1992 to 1996, and Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the current director of MI5. Rimington was exposed as the head of MI5 by the British press but then used her public profile to introduce a more open and accountable era for the secret services. Since her retirement she has published her memoirs and several novels about espionage. Manningham-Buller was appointed deputy director general of MI5 in 1997 and became its director in 2002.

Both women have changed the public face of the secret service, just as women doctors, lawyers and academics have changed those professions. This is not to say that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Women and men are not equal in the workplace, despite legislative efforts to make them so. The Fawcett Society notes that in Britain: "Women working full-time earn, on average, 17% less an hour than men working full-time. For women working part-time the gap is 36% an hour. 11% of directors of the UK's top 100 companies are women."

While changes are taking place, most professions are still male dominated at the higher levels.

This makes the woman spy a very suggestive figure. Historically, she has been sexually suggestive but I would propose her as a politically suggestive figure in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The changing roles of women spies in fiction and in the "real world" track changing gender roles in Western economies, as political and legislative movements take effect. Yet the woman spy is also a useful allegory for the woman in the professional workplace; she is a double agent. Not quite one of the boys and still often having to prove herself as better than her male peers in order to attain the same level of achievement, the female professional is that odd creature: a woman and a doctor/lawyer/teacher/professor. Spies, doctors, actors, poets, and artists are seen as predominantly male in the West, hence the woman doctor and the woman poet. In this fashion women remain spies within Western culture -- still added-on as a prefix to distinguish us from the "real" doctors, the "real" poets.

British and American cultures still struggle to make room for women. Women are still forging roles for themselves within the public arena; the calls for universal childcare in the feminist movements of the seventies have not been heard, and women entering a male-dominated profession often find themselves subject to abuse. If spies are agents, then the woman spy is doubly transgressive because she crosses the line that ordinarily designates woman as object rather than subject. Women spies in popular fiction, film, and television represent an uneasy rapprochement between women spies as agents/subjects and as objects.

Depictions of female spies thus reflect upon women's conundrum in twenty-first century in the wake of alleged equal opportunities: the doubled emphasis on work and on the work of femininity, that women be beautiful, make a home, have children, care for them. Where John Berger once asserted that "men act and women appear," in the twenty-first century privileged white women are often required to both act and appear. Women spy-protagonists in popular fictions map this dynamic. Television series like Alias and films like Nikita show how women spies cross the boundaries of femininity and are shepherded back to it by visual codes of beauty, whiteness, and heterosexuality. They both break out and are contained, becoming an amphibious combination of radical and reactionary. In this way the woman as spy in popular culture tests the bounds of gender and is encrypted both as a cypher of social change and of resistance to change.

See more stories tagged with: culture, gender, sexuality, spies

Rosie White is Senior Lecturer in English at Northumbria University (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK). Her book, Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture, was published by Routledge in 2008.