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The Enigma of the Male Sex Symbol

When Daniel Craig emerged from the sea as the new James Bond in Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006), his appearance (and his physique) created a media furore. For the first time since the days of Sean Connery, James Bond was once again a sex symbol. Starting with the many examples offered by the James Bond franchise, this essay identifies the sex symbol as a ubiquitous but essentially ill-defined category of celebrity status. This is an essay that was written as a contribution to a special edition of Celebrity Studies; Sex and Celebrity, that I was guest editor for.

Challenging a ‘common-sense’ understanding of the sex symbol the essay emphasises the importance of the sex symbol as a way into understanding the complexity and mutability of attitudes towards sex and sexuality. The intention of this essay is to bring the category of sex symbol into critical view, to make some provisional suggestions as to the ways in which this phenomenon might be interrogated and to consider what the specific issues might be in relation to an understanding of the male sex symbol in particular.

This essay extends my work around gay representation to a wider consideration of the ways in which sexuality is represented across a diversity of media texts (although cinema is the primary focus here) and the ways in which the male body and ideals of masculinity are articulated in what is often described as an increasingly and for some problematically ‘sexualised’ contemporary culture. This work around representation and in particular gendered and sexualised representations lies at the heart of the work of the Screen Cultures research cluster.