Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity [Paperback]

Hans Turley (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0814782248 | ISBN-13: 978-0814782248 | Publication Date: June 1, 2001

Despite, or perhaps because of, our lack of actual knowledge about pirates, an immense architecture of cultural mythology has arisen around them. Three hundred years of novels, plays, painting, and movies have etched into the popular imagination contradictory images of the pirate as both arch-criminal and anti-hero par excellence. How did the pirate-a real threat to mercantilism and trade in early-modern Britain-become the hypermasculine anti-hero familiar to us through a variety of pop culture outlets? How did the pirate's world, marked as it was by sexual and economic transgression, come to capture our collective imagination?

In Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, Hans Turley delves deep into the archives to examine the homoerotic and other culturally transgressive aspects of the pirate's world and our prurient fascination with it. Turley fastens his eye on historical documents, trial records, and the confessions of pirates, as well as literary works such as Robinson Crusoe, to track the birth and development of the pirate image and to show its implications for changing notions of self, masculinity, and sexuality in the modern era.

Turley's wide-ranging analysis provides a new kind of history of both piracy and desire, articulating the meaning of the pirate's contradictory image to literary, cultural, and historical studies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A splendid account of piracy as a historical and cultural production of emerging modern culture. Hans Turley shows the ways in which sodomy and piracy are inextricable from the cultural imagination of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, encourages us to rethink not only pirate history, but the history of sexuality as well."

-George E. Haggerty,University of California, Riverside

"No simplifying on my part will do justice to Turley's exhaustive readings and display of complex ideas."

-Left History 8.1,

"Turley presents a thoroughly-researched literay and cultural history of the transgressive pirate figure in the early eighteenth-century."

-Journal of Folklore Research,

About the Author

Hans Turley was Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814782248
• ISBN-13: 978-0814782248
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,362,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not for everyone, July 23, 2003

By 

Rachel E. Pollock (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (Paperback)

This is a very dry, dense, academic book that attempts to analyze what the author refers to as "sodomitical activity" in the golden age of piracy based on source documents original to the period. It is slow reading, and if you're looking for lurid gay sex and rampant queerness among pirates, just stick to Pirates of the Caribbean slashfic because it's not in here.

The author admits that due to social taboos of sodomy and homosexuality, the overt references in period works are basically non-existant. Instead however, he offers contextual readings of various documents, historical events, and literature of the period that makes a case for subtextual evidence of homosexual predilection among some pirates of the time (for example, the section of the Pirate's Articles that specifies no woman or boy be brought aboard ship, which he interprets as an implication that some crewmen might have regarded boys/boy prostitutes as desirable).

He does raise some interesting questions about the contrast between pirates being depicted at the time as "hypermasculine", and how that can be reconciled with the fact that pirate society was by nature "homosocial," and how its homosociality would allow for various types of relationships among the men. He also offers some very interesting criticism and ideas about the significance and homosexual implications of the Daniel Defoe novel Captain Singleton, in which the piratical hero develops a very close, committed, lifelong relationship with his shipmate, Quaker William.

Overall, though, the book is overly conscious of its own academic tone (in that sort of "in the following chapter I will endeavor to show (blah blah blah)" fashion, or, in the introduction a sort of itemization of "chapter one will explore such and such, and chapter two will investigate thus and that," etc) and the chapters do not hang together well in a linear fashion. The book is very choppy to read as a whole work, and seems like it might be a compendium of various essays on the topic that the author wrote over a span of several years, for various reasons, which by virtue of a common theme of homosexual investigation, he then cobbled together into a single book. The last chapter is such an exaustive explication of the Robinson Crusoe trilogy, largely avoiding the subject of homosexuality altogether, that I had to struggle to finish it.

So. Useful information in places, interesting ideas, not terribly readably executed. I would only recommend this book to those dedicated to a in-depth study of the history of piracy and/or gay history. It did make me interested in reading Captain Singleton at some point...

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, Timeless, February 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (Hardcover)

I must disagree with the narcissitic assessment of other readers and point out that Professor Turley gives us the pirate tradition in a refreshingly vivid and informed historical frame. He does not, as some recent pop philosophers have, merely appropriate this complicated and obscure realm of masculinity to posit as some kind of ahistorical arcadia. Instead, peppering his account with the thrilling vocabulary of original pirate narratives, Turley brilliantly offers the pirate example as a prism through which our current agonizing over narrative and gender can be usefully refracted. Scholarhship this lively, impassioned, and deeply informed is all too rare. Bravo, Professor Turley!

11 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Shiver me timbers!!, December 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (Hardcover)

This book brought home, in a very real sense my experiences growing up in a sea-going family. Oh, how I longed for the days of swashbuckling and hotbunking. A bit too graphic, perhaps, for the faint of heart. Overall, a good effort.