Conference paper presented by Hannah Banks at the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Conference (AWGSA) 2024 “Not Just Another (Feminist) Conference”: Gathering To Explore Courageous Feminisms.
ABSTRACT
Our Flag Means Death (2022) is a television series set in the Golden Age of Piracy, premiering in March 2022 to critical acclaim and unprecedented audience engagement. It can be argued that this show is a deliberate romantic queer reading of historical facts. In our article (Luttrell and Banks 2024) we proposed that queer reading is a particular form of audience labour, a practice of learning to recognize, identify and create patterns of semiotic resources, Intertextual Thematic Formations (Lemke 1995a, 1995b). This practice is a reaction to a history of being erased or relegated to subtext in fictional media, exacerbated by broader cultural and political contexts that criminalise, censor, and de-humanize LGBTQIA+ bodies and lives. The diversity in Our Flag Means Death goes beyond the LGBTQIA+ community (including Season 2’s representations of women), confirmed by multiple media think pieces and fan writings on the internet. In this paper we will make the case that readers usually have to ‘do extra work’ to see marginalised bodies and communities in texts. We discuss Our Flag Means Death as a case study of care and empathy in how the show creators approached diverse and inclusive representations, both on the show and in the staffing. We will also explore how the fandom exemplifies a community of care, reveling in creativity and joy to celebrate a television show they love.