Gender disguise is a major context for exploring homoerotic potential in literature and was a significant tool for establishing same-sex partnerships in real life examples. The most common version is a female-assigned person who presents as male and has access to a male role in relation to a woman. Not all such partnerships may have included sexual activity, but many demonstrably did. Literary examples generally indicate whether the disguise is meant to be situational or is meant to signal transgender identity. Real life examples are rarely clear on this point, due to the legal and social pressures and consequences, and therefore the likely distortion of self-reported motivations.
The General History of the Pirates
And now we’re ready to see what the General History says about Bonny and Read, three years after these events. The text I have is the second edition. My understanding is that the first edition also contained the material on Bonny and Read in the main text, but that only the appendices were new to the second edition.
Sorting Out Rackham’s Crew
Given the wide variety of numbers given for Rackham’s crew, it might be useful to digress a moment and try to sort things out.
I was inspired to tackle this set of material because of the flood of sapphic “pirate romances,” many of which are reworkings of the myth (and I use “myth” advisedly) of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, while others spin off from the Hollywood version of the broader myths of the Golden Age of Piracy derived from the anonymously authored General History of the Pirates. As often happens, I was curious to know the original primary source materials that set these myths in motion. Moreover, I was curious to try to determine what parts of that source material might have any basis in fact.
The basic theme of this article is how, even as the overt message of Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe denies the possibility or imaginability of female same-sex love, the way in which it does so creates and reinforces that possibility in the audience’s reception. The article starts with a detailed synopsis (for which you could see my podcast on the topic).
I can forgive Vicinus for starting off by claiming that much of the historical work on cross-dressing men has focused on the theater and especially on Shakespeare’s works, only because this article was written before much of the work on gender-crossing and trans history has been done. She’s looking at the couple of decades around 1900, a time when understandings of gender and sexuality were undergoing one of those periodic revolutions. The instability of how to read “male impersonation” came from both the multiplicity of framings of the act itself and the attitude of the viewer.
This article is something of a cross-genre, cross-temporal look at the representation of Anne Bonny and Mary Read as “sapphic pirates” and what part their stories have played within the constructed image of 18th century piracy and colonialism.
Narratives of the lives and “adventures” of passing women were popular in 18th century British culture, purporting to provide biographies of women who lived as a man for some period of time, including: Hannah Snell, Christian Davies, Jenny Cameron, Anne Bonny & Mary Read, Charlotte Charke, Elizabeth Ogden, an unnamed “apothecary’s wife” whose story is appended to the English translation of the life of Catharine Vizzani, and Mary Hamilton whose story inspired the label “female husband” for those passing women who engaged in relationships with other women.
Manion’s book Female Husbands: A Trans History came out in 2020. This is something of a “teaser” article in what appears to be a local history magazine (rather than an academic journal) presenting information from that research that is specific to Pennsylvania. See the Project’s coverage of the later book for a broader picture.
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York.
This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.
