Queer Chat Time! Our Flag Means Queer Futurity, or Munoz + Waititi 4 Ever

[radiantfracture]

This is the post where we take the Muñoz doll and the Our Flag Means Death dolls and make them kiss.

So I’ve been doing a (roughly) fortnightly series here reading José Esteban Muñoz’ book of queer theory Cruising Utopia (2009, 2019), chapter by chapter.

And then we all watched Our Flag Means Death.

It just seems right to try a mashup and see what happens.

Muñoz’s project in Cruising Utopia is to find and (re)claim visions of queer utopias in order to provide inspiration for livable queer futures outside of the stultifying constraints of capitalist heteronormativity.

Pirates are semi-famous for somewhat similar endeavours. Can Our Flag Means Death do some of that work (and play) with and for us? What visions can we use it to conjure?

We could boil down the central questions of the first three chapters of Cruising Utopia sort of like this:

• How can the utopian visions of past queer communities inform our visions of a future that's livable for all queer folks, not just the privileged few?
• What do the utopian visions of the past tell us about what we are missing and longing for right now?
• What practices already exist in our present communities that could provide inspirations for queer futures?

So some questions about Our Flag Means Death might be these:

• What images from the past (history, media) do you see Our Flag Means Death talking back to?
  • Ex. histories of piracy, readings of history, queerbaiting in mainstream series, Black Sails?
• What are you longing for that these pirates have? How does OFMD illuminate what is missing in the present?
• What about this show (or how it came to be) could be useful in thinking about how to make queer art / art about queers going forward?
• Alternatively, what do you know about queerness and community that Our Flag Means Death doesn’t yet know?

For example, I really like that you do not have to be cool to be part of this queer pirate crew. In fact, trying to be cool makes you miserable, fake, and impossible to live with (Izzy Hands, the French). Being a big ridiculous grimy mess is ideal on the Revenge. I appreciate this.

Anyway, the formal invitation is to think about Muñoz with OFMD, but feel free to party any way you like, provided it's respectful and consensual.

And if part of the way you appreciate things is to talk about what's flawed or disappointing about them, that is welcome, too.

* * * * * *

Previous posts on Munoz:

Munoz Chapter 1

Munoz Chapter 2

Munoz Chapter 3



{rf}

Comments

[radiantfracture]

I believe kindkit said something clever about the show’s take on toxic masculinity.

[sabotabby]

I read some fun takes (in meme/shitposting form, naturally) where someone pointed out that there are almost no significant female characters. Just, really, Spanish Jackie and later Stede's wife and daughter, who are only developed characters in the last episode. And yet this didn't bother the commenter because the vision of masculinity presented is so radically different from toxic masculinity that it didn't suffer from any of the issues posed by other primarily male-focused shows.

[sabotabby]

I am of course fascinated by pirates and as Problematic as it is, Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias was one of those works that sparked an obsession for me. I think it's overly idealistic in that it very much glosses over the racial dynamics in favour of the "pirate ships were anarchist spaces" thesis but it's a foundation for reimagining pirates as closer to mutual aid societies than the rollicking libertarian thieves of popular imagination.

The obvious antecedent is Black Sails, which, show of my heart. To quote another shitpost, "Black Sails walked so that Our Flag Means Death could frolic in the fields." And in many ways they are such similar shows, not just that they are shows about gay pirates but in that they are very queer shows about gay pirates that spend a lot of time interrogating masculinity and sexuality and actually going much farther than Wilson did in examining the dynamics of race and colonialism. I joke about how OFMD is just Black Sails with the last vestiges of heterosexuality removed, but I can still remember how utterly shocking and subversive the second and last seasons of Black Sails were. Like here is a show with Michael Bay as an executive producer, ffs, and they had two poly relationships amongst the main cast, the macho antihero lead was bisexual, he was motivated to go to war with the British Empire to avenge his dead male lover, with the support of said lover's wife. And if that wasn't enough, they pulled the rug out a second time and very deliberate un-buried the gay and gave all the surviving queer characters a happy ending in a genre where that basically never happens. While, at the same time, portraying Maroons and workers' revolts in fairly historically accurate ways. It was bonkers. I still can't believe they did that.

So, it's just the same show with a different tone.

[yarrowkat]

...i think i must have stopped watching Black Sails too early. i think i couldn't get past the way the women were treated in the first maybe three episodes and i wandered off. maybe i'll give it another shot!

[yarrowkat]

i don't really ever take classes anymore but reading your discussions of your class here, i want to take it. :) it sounds hella fun.

[sabotabby]

Oh yeah, the plotline with Max is absolutely awful and misguided. There absolutely is payoff down the road but I am positive they could have gotten there in basically any other way.

[yarrowkat]

sounds like it works out to be worth it, tho?

[sabotabby]

For me it was. She ends up having an amazing character arc and despite a few fumbles, the story overall is just so beautifully told.

[kindkit]

I don't think I said anything more clever than noticing that OFMD explicitly places toxic masculinity at the root of a lot of evils. Also I haven't read Munoz and it's been a long time since I did any queer theory. But I'm happy to talk about the show!

1) Talking back to the past: It's responding in a complex way to the romanticization of violence in pirate mythology. Yes, it says, this was a culture that demanded brutality, and wasn't that awful and miserable and damaging? Wasn't it really the opposite of freedom? Blackbeard is utterly imprisoned by the persona he has to embody; he's the terror of the high seas, but he himself is terrified to show a tear or touch a piece of silk. By extension, it's critiquing the image of the past as a time when men were real men and women were real women.

Stede, meanwhile, was imprisoned by a different kind of normative masculinity, the expectation of marriage and fatherhood. I think in some ways the boldest move OFMD makes is portraying the breakup of Stede's marriage/household as a good thing. Even when he first runs away, it's ultimately liberating for all concerned, and it's even more successful when he does it again with Mary's and the kids' consent and cooperation. Although part of it is that heterosexual domesticity is all set to reassert itself in a happier form behind him after he leaves. (An interesting question, though, is whether Mary and Doug intend to get married now that Stede is once again officially dead. I don't think it's at all clear that they do. Mary is pretty content as a widow. So the better version of heterosexual domesticity may be a much less conventional one.) Anyway, no nostalgia here for traditional marriage.

It's definitely talking back to queerbaiting. I was exceedingly pleased when Taika Waititi said, in a tweet, not to call Stede and Ed's relationship a bromance, because it's a romance. (When I watched the show for the first time I was unspoiled as to what the "queer content" I was promised was going to be. So at first I thought "maybe I'm reading too much into this," then I thought it might be queerbaiting and was prepared to be angry. As it turned out . . . certain things make me think the show may have been deliberately NOT queerbaiting, if that makes sense. The episode title "This Is Happening" gestures towards all the shows that have teased and then said "of course it's not actually happening." Gestures towards them with a middle finger.

[kindkit]

2) What are you longing for that these pirates have?

Blackbeard's beard? (I described it on Twitter as my beard goal--possibly achievable in about 2030. Le sigh.)

More seriously, and barely half formulated, but: to be loved because of one's secret shames and not despite them? A big part of what Ed loves in Stede are the things Stede has always been taught to be ashamed of: his gentleness, his pleasure in things like a fine fabric and a good lavender soap, his sheer over-the-top extra-ness. And Stede loves Ed's secret self too, the one who wants to care about fashion and go to parties and maybe not kill people so much. That's not the whole story--Stede loves Ed's swashbuckling boldness and brilliance, and so do we as audience, and Ed loves the courage the Stede doesn't even know he has. It's the courage to leave his marriage or stand up to a bunch of rich bullies at a party, rather than physical courage, but I think that may make it all the more valuable to Ed, who's seen physical courage aplenty.

The way they treasure each other's weakness and weirdness is a beautiful thing. I don't think the desire to be loved like that is specific to queer people, but I think all too many of us still experience hiding whole aspects of ourselves, maybe being ashamed of them, so it's likely to speak more to us than to a cishet audience.

As for the other characters: there's a culture of acceptance/affirmation among Stede's crew despite clashing personalities. It comes through in regards to sexuality and gender, but I also think of things like Buttons's friendship with Carl, and how everyone reacted to Carl's death. It's a very big deal to Buttons, so it's a big deal to them too. Nobody says, "Oh, come on, it was just a bird, why do you care?" I'd say it was like a nerdy online space, except that nerdy online spaces are usually full of gatekeeping and the tyranny of small differences. And "the queer community," if that's even a useful term, is divided in all kinds of ways.

Both of these, I guess, are examples of the way the show explicitly values that which is often dismissed as valueless. I'm thinking especially of feminine-coded things here, from decorative objects to stories to skills like sewing to personality traits like Lucius's emotional insight and supportiveness.


. . . wow, I guess I had a lot more thoughts about this show than I realized. I may come back and comment more another time.

[radiantfracture]

Ha, I wish I could do this for class -- this is just for fun.

[sabotabby]

(An interesting question, though, is whether Mary and Doug intend to get married now that Stede is once again officially dead. I don't think it's at all clear that they do. Mary is pretty content as a widow. So the better version of heterosexual domesticity may be a much less conventional one.)

Everything about the show is so deliberately written that your take is almost certainly the correct one. The widow's group is the textual evidence that we need. These are women taking joy in their power and freedom. Doug isn't really part of Mary's social class—she can only have a relationship with him in the context of her being a widow. Marriage in this society is about property relations, and Mary has no desire to be property.

I would take an entire spinoff on Mary and the widows.

The episode title "This Is Happening" gestures towards all the shows that have teased and then said "of course it's not actually happening." Gestures towards them with a middle finger.

God I love this.

I was absolutely unspoiled for the show. The only things I knew were the real historical accounts of Stede and Blackbeard and that I'd probably like it because Taiki Waititi is good at everything. I started to see "he made the pirates gay!" posts on Tumblr, but Tumblr thinks that everything is gay, bless its heart.

And of course we don't really meet Blackbeard until the third episode (OFMD follows romance beats but not at the expense of the story it's telling), and we have Lucius as a bit of a red herring. Okay, this is a fun sitcom about pirates and we have an obviously gay side character who may get a romance with another side character. This isn't uncommon these days. It's the drawn out romance with the two leads that makes it completely unexpected.

[yarrowkat]

oh! well no wonder it sounds like fun. ;)

[yarrowkat]

wait, Stede is a historical figure? whoa. *goes away to read*

[yarrowkat]

thank you! this is helpful. i'll add Black Sails back to my list.

[sabotabby]

Oh my gosh, yes. And the depiction of him on the show is not, as far as I know, all that exaggerated (he absolutely did have a library on his ship). Nor is the theory that he remained unmurdered by Blackbeard for a whole year and a half because they were fucking a wildly unlikely theory.

(For that matter, the theory that Blackbeard actually killed very few people and relied on his reputation and theatrical effects has quite a lot of historical evidence going for it.)

[yarrowkat]

i am ineluctably reminded of the Dread Pirate Roberts in the Princess Bride - major overtones of that whole thing going on here. and OFMD doesn't treat the subject very seriously, which probably contributes to the resemblance.

the historical bit makes it much more fun. i understand the show isn't shooting for historial accuracy per se (loads of contemporary colloqualisms in the dialogue, etc) but though i understand it as an artistic choice, it is a bit jarring for me. so it's helpful to know they're not making things up whole cloth as well, but instead riffing on a series of actual events! i am reading through Stede & Blackbeard's wikipedia pages now, to get an outline.

[radiantfracture]

I saw comments like this too, and while I'm delighted with the story as-is for Season One, and pretty joyful about Jim's non-binary characterization, I do think the lack of female pirates (since they were real and documented and stuff) is a gap. I feel like everybody should get to be at this party.

Black Sails makes liberal use of real-life female pirates, so I feel like OFMD could too -- unless they didn't want too much overlap with BS characters? I'm not clear how much *direct* influence OFMD takes from BS.

[radiantfracture]

Okay, but I was really hoping somebody *would* bring up Pirate Utopias, so thank you. (I haven't read it, just heard rumour.(

I feel like this is a perfect Munoz Moment, like okay -- Lamborn's history is flawed and idealized. There can still be valuable principles to be drawn from the story he tells or the research he presents.

I'm not entirely sure how I can instantiate anarchist piracy in my own life but by god I'd like to try.

[radiantfracture]

You'll see in commentaries about Black Sails -- and I'm not the most expert here -- viewers say things like: this starts as a trashy pirate show and turns into a queer anti-colonial revolution.

(Somebody I follow put this sentiment much better, but I can't find it.)

I was also put right off by Max's initial plotline; it was both exploitative and nonsensical.

[radiantfracture]

explicitly places toxic masculinity at the root of a lot of evils

I really feel that, though -- the way Ed's "return" to being Blackbeard is an expression of grief and hurt that makes him more miserable (and breaks up a great crew.)

It's responding in a complex way to the romanticization of violence in pirate mythology

That's such a great point. The violence in the show is traumatic or grotesquely comedic, but not heroic; the most heroic act is arguably Ed's act of surrender to the British. *Not* making a doomed heroic last stand, but a pragmatic act that saves everyone's lives.

deliberately NOT queerbaiting,

Totally! I think they gave us the exact setup of queerbait -- strong chemistry between the leads + plus side characters to "channel" the queerness -- and then were like "nope this was the story all along." Revisionist queerbaiting. Queetbait baiting.

[radiantfracture]

A big part of what Ed loves in Stede are the things Stede has always been taught to be ashamed of: his gentleness, his pleasure in things like a fine fabric and a good lavender soap, his sheer over-the-top extra-ness.

I love that Ed finds Stede's actions (like having a library) wild and bold.

the show explicitly values that which is often dismissed as valueless

That's such a perfect way of putting it -- in the first few episodes, it might look like Stede's gentleness and caring for his crew are comedic failures in piracy, but in the end they're the core strength of that community. Even the crew might not realize what he's done for them. (I knew it when we saw the image of all four flags flying at once.)

I may come back and comment more another time.

Please! Any time. This was awesome.

[radiantfracture]

Your comments have been awesome, so please come to my classes any time...

[radiantfracture]

Nor is the theory that he remained unmurdered by Blackbeard for a whole year and a half because they were fucking a wildly unlikely theory.

Right -- another thing I love is that this is a wholly plausible theory, and much more plausible than any number of other plot twists in any number of other "historical" shows -- and I feel like the showrunners know this, know that queer history is about reading these gaps and interstices in the official records.

-We know queer relationships happened
-Here's an odd explanatory gap for some human behaviour
-Here is a totally reasonable explanation for it: a queer relationship

[radiantfracture]

it's helpful to know they're not making things up whole cloth

This made a huge difference for me, too, in a way I find hard to explain. It felt a lot more meaningful to know that this was a reading of a real relationship (of whatever kind) rather than sheer invention.