Skip the corsets, we’d rather have childcare: gendering spycraft in genre fiction and memoir

Abstract

ABSTRACT In ‘Skip the Corsets’ I ask how female former operatives writing about their work at CIA have responded to the post-9/11 era in both memoirs and fiction. I analyse texts that offer a vision of the post-9/11 world order as one in which the qualities of a good intelligence specialist may include empathy and maternal instinct. As the Agency has come under criticism for torture, illegal extraditions, and drone attacks, I look at how depictions of women intelligence specialists created by women writers have negotiated with that criticism, and also suggested other ways of envisioning the role of American intelligence.