“The Sea Will Make a Man of Him?”: Hypervirility, Effeminacy, and the Figure of the Queer Pirate in the Popular Imagination from the Early Eighteenth-Century to Hollywood

Abstract

The figure of Captain Jack Sparrow, charismatic rogue and best pirate ever, has captured the cinema audience like no other pirate before him, it seems. Ask anyone what they think about Pirates of the Caribbean, and their response will very likely be centred on Johnny Depp's flamboyant performance. Sparrow's insistence on status ("It's Captain Sparrow!"), on physical prowess, his skills in navigation and his having a bride in every port seem to mark him out as the typically virile pirate familiar to us from so many pirate movies of the twentieth century. Yet from the start, Sparrow's virility sits oddly with his other signature character traits: his failure as a leader, his preference of negotiation to open fight ("Why fight when you can negotiate? All one needs is the proper leverage."), his slightly drunken swagger and mannered gesticulation, his mixture of elaborate wordplay and slurry pronunciation, let his demonstrative virility look like an act. Indeed, his performance of pirate manliness forever hesitates – almost uncannily, always hilariously – between hypervirility and effeminacy. This essay traces the “queer” pirate figure to the eighteenth-century popular imagination and explores the fascination its ambiguous gender performance holds for audiences, then as now.