Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes in James Bond Film Series

The article demonstrates mutual interconnection between the ongoing social discourse and narratives of popular culture over the last fifty years on the example of film series with protagonist James Bond. The chosen method that combines the multidisciplinary approach to the analysis with the contextualisation of a pop-cultural text is aimed at demonstrating the possibilities of visual anthropology in the realm of social and cultural analysis. The texts highlights the examples when an artistic narrative is controlled by diverse types of social dispositive and the resulting art text also forms and determines the way of thinking about bases of social discourse. The social discourse practice and the pop-cultural narratives are addressed in a dialectic symbiosis: depiction of relationship between man and woman, frequency of sexual intercourse or its absence in a narrative, way of depicting the “otherness”, and ethnicity and nationality of characters are signs that reflect geopolitical situation, types of global threat, social taboo and imperatives, stratification of the society, and ideals of lifestyle. Simultaneously, the above signs spread and strengthen the depicted stereotypes in pop-cultural texts. The reflection and reproduction of social reality dissolve in the pop-culture, and as a consequence, they influence the behaviour and ways of thinking, the product of which they are.