Stepping Out: Representations of Female Sexuality in the Canadian Television Series Bomb Girls

Abstract

This paper analyzes representations of female sexuality in the Canadian prime-time television series Bomb Girls (2012-2013), which depicts the lives of women working at a munitions factory in Toronto during the Second World War. The historical drama takes place in a period of simultaneous restraint and liberation around female gender and sexuality. This paper contends that Bomb Girls (re)constructs a narrative about female sexuality that breaks from a traditionally gendered and heteronormative story. Bomb Girls challenges dominant discourse on representations of gender in media, instead capturing the complexities around female sexual relationships and sexual orientation during the war. These threads coalesce into a narrative that paints the ‘bomb girls’ themselves as progressive symbols of female sexuality. This paper, like the series, contributes to a feminist counter-discourse focusing on the plurality of female voices and experiences and, in doing so, it pays tribute to working women on the Canadian home front during the war.