SEXTANT: masculinities, sexualities & decolonialities

ABSTRACT

The television series Our Flag Means Death follows the story of the ‘Gentleman Pirate’ Stede Bonnet, who leaves his family to become a pirate alongside the infamous Blackbeard. Based on a true story, Our Flag Means Death aligns piracy and queerness as one and the same. This essay reads mythical creatures in Our Flag Means Death as embodying an alternate space/time that contests the Symbolic and charts a course toward a queer future. Using Lee Edelman’s antisocial thesis (2004) in combination with José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopia (2009), this essay combines these seemingly incoherent frameworks to reveal the connection between Symbolic meaning and Straight Time. Our Flag Means Death, in rejecting Straight Time, also rejects a rigid adherence to Symbolic meaning to create an antisocial queer utopia.

KEY WOrDS

straight time; queer temporality; heteronormativity; utopia; antisocial queer theory

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