Rogue Breasts, Dangerous Thighs, and Buibuis: Examining the Representations of Female Pirates and their Implications for Research and Practice in the Somalia Context

When imagining pirates, images of bearded and burly men wearing puff sleeved shirts and battle-torn trousers, adorned with gold hoop earrings, and waving a gun or sword come to mind. These men, standing aloft menacing vessels accentuated with black sails, dominate the popular imaginary of what constitute a pirate. Women are seldom featured in this imaginary but that is not to say that female pirates have not captured the attention of readers and viewers throughout history. Rather, what a female pirate looks like and the roles she plays has slowly evolved over time. Narrative and illustrative depictions of female pirates broadly capture the public’s attention as early as the 18th century. Over the next three centuries, descriptions of female pirates both reflected and co-produced broader social understandings and cultural expectations of gender and sexed bodies through the lens of maritime crime. This presentation traces the evolution of the ‘female pirate subject’ as depicted in literature and entertainment to theorize what these representations say about how female pirates look, behave, and what roles they play. These representations are then put into conversation with the realities of contemporary female pirates operating in Somalia, to better understand where the historical-fictive female pirate subject differs and/or converges with the contemporary-real female pirate subject. The broader implications of this study are to underscore the importance of fieldwork in shedding light on the roles of women involved in piracy in Somalia and to theorize about how popular imaginaries of women in organized crime are important.