Enemies of All Mankind: Gender, Violence and the Queering of Anne Bonny and Mary Read

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anne Bonny and Mary Read remain the best known, and perhaps only, female pirates active in the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, the late 17th and early 18th century in the Caribbean. They were caught and sentenced to death but no records exist of an execution. This paper engages with the multiplicity of fictions inspired by the brief record of their trial and traces how legal meaning can be created and negotiated through the imaginative genealogy of a single trial, and in particular how the form of these secondary texts reflects changing attitudes towards gender, sexuality and violence.