Rum Sodomy And The Lash Chapter Summary

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash by Hans Turley explores the intersectionality of masculinity, sexuality and identity within the British Royal Navy from 1660 to 1820s. The book sought to explore the connections between sexuality, gender and authority within the historical context of this period. It utilized several pieces of work, including diaries, letters, and popular literature during this time. Further, Turley’s work explores how these cultural forces that shaped sexuality and masculinity throughout the eighteenth century have continued to shape ideas about gender and sexuality following this era and even into society as we now know it. For example, Turley sought to explain that culture within piracy contained hypermasculine ideas which were built

In 1757, a sailor who was convicted of sexually assaulting a young male received a beating of 500 lashes, while in 1762, two men received 1000 lashes each for engaging in consensual sex, and in 1806, there were more hangings in England for sodomy than there were for murder offences. Chapter 3 of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash stresses the differences between a pirate’s trial versus a sodomist’s trial in court. Turley explains that pirates are economic criminals, and their crimes directly threaten property. At the same time, sodomites do not put the public in danger but rather challenge the separation between males and females and are no longer a part of the domestic economy and are instead a threat to society’s economic order. It is evident that sodomy was viewed as the worst offence and did not protect the public from real, dangerous

Turley explains, “heterosexual desire occupies a dominant place in an emergent middle-class society. This is a society that classifies men and women into separate and interlocking spheres of economic subjectivity”. Moreover, the anonymous author of the work titled Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy explained that men who engage in sodomy could not separate their sexual identity through this “non-human action, and asks the question, “Since he does not act like a man, and he is not a woman, how can he be human?... to the author of Plain Reasons, the sodomite is closer to an “Ape” or a