When Daniel Craig emerged from the sea as the new James Bond in Casino Royale in 2006, his appearance as well as his physique created a media furore.

With this James Bond was, once again, a sex symbol.

Whilst the term sex symbol was likely coined in the 1950s (the origin of the term is unclear), the idea of a film star invested with a surplus of romantic and sexual appeal was already established by the 1920s.

We now tend to think of sex symbols as female, though in fact the earliest stars with a romantic following were men, most notably Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro. What's more, these men did not conform to the white Anglo-Saxon protestant ideal, but instead represented the excitement, indeed the threat, of the different.

In this talk John Mercer looks at the male sex symbol in popular cinema from the silent era onwards. He argues that rather than being straightforward in what they represent, male sex symbols in fact tell us a lot about the complex and contradictory way that masculinity functions in popular culture.

About the speaker:

John Mercer is Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Birmingham City University.

He is the author of Rock Hudson, BFI publishing 2015 and of Melodrama: Genre Style Sensibility (with Martin Shingler) Columbia University Press 2004.

In 2016 he provided an audio commentary to the Criterion Collection 4K restoration of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows with Tamar Jeffers-McDonald of University of Kent.

He is co-editor of the Journal of Gender Studies and with Professor Clarissa Smith he runs the Arts and Humanities Research Council research network Masculinity, Sex and Popular Culture and associated Routledge book series.

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