Rum, sodomy, and the lash: piracy, sexuality, and masculine identity

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 Turley fastens his eye on historical
documents, trial records, and the confessions of pirates, as well as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.