Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright (review)

Caren Irr’s intriguing monograph on the figurative female pirate and copyright is both enjoyable to read and deeply researched. It explores legal precedents as well as literary and cultural history, outlining and unpacking the developments of copyright laws. Irr refuses to accept uncritically earlier histories of the subject, suggesting, for example, that the Statute of Anne (1710) may not have been so unproblematically the origin of authorial rights. Rather, Irr explores how alternate readings of property law offer a richer basis for understanding everything from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s copyright problems to Mattel suing the Miss America pageant for copyright infringement of the iconic Barbie doll.

Irr’s exploration of copyright notes that deeply held assumptions about what copyright does (protects the writer and encourages the writer to produce more work) do not hold in relation to women’s writing, which for long periods of time has not had the same protection. Before 1860, married American women did not or could not hold their own intellectual property but were subject to coverture. After a chapter on the history of copyright from a feminist perspective, which spans the three hundred years from the Statute of Anne to the present, the book focuses on four authors—Ursula Le Guin, Andrea Barrett, Kathy Acker, and Leslie Marmon Silko—who all explore, in various ways, the issues of legitimacy, piracy, and indigenous creativity. Throughout the book, Irr moves from property and literature to discussions of outputs and fora that are stereotypically gendered female, such as fashion, beauty, cookery, and design, and these discussions enrich and enliven her arguments.

The chapter on Le Guin explores maternity and anarchy and begins by analyzing a case brought, unsuccessfully, against the Children’s Television Workshop by Rebecca Reyher in 1976. The case revolved around a children’s story based upon Reyher’s mother’s oral tales. Copyright was not infringed, it was argued, because stories of lost children reunited with mothers, were, if not universal, then certainly part of the public domain and because beauty was in the eye of the beholder (in this case, a child about her mother). This decision reinforces Irr’s earlier argument that copyright laws are explicitly gendered. Le Guin’s work, which has maternal origins like the case above, is then explored in relation to property rights.

The next chapter focuses on Andrea Barrett’s work, which is seen by Irr as middlebrow, though “in the best sense of the word” (p. 101). Irr explores Barrett’s “turn towards a communal creativity” and offers a link to a completely different locale: the dispute between Donna Karan and Inuit seamstresses in 1999, which was resolved out of court (p. 101). Similarly, Irr’s fourth chapter, on Kathy Acker’s literary piracy—based not only on her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), but also on her well-known plagiarism and literary borrowing—begins with a discussion of two cases brought by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders for copyright and trademark infringement: the first against the pornographic film Debbie Does Dallas (1978), and the second against a parodic poster that mimicked “real” posters of the cheerleaders. In both suits, what was at stake, Irr argues, was control over sexual images—or a desexualizing of the “wrong” sort of female body. The following chapter focuses on Leslie Marmon Silko’s work and her own parodic representations. It, too, begins elsewhere—with an exploration of 2 Live Crew’s parodic song “Pretty Woman” and the legal battles that ensued.

The book concludes with an exploration of the “pink commons” or “the shared utopian project of rethinking property” (p. 159). That Irr is able to weave so many disparate—but clearly connected—examples together is a measure of her control over the material. She also is good at closely reading the texts she chooses as illustrative of her arguments, though at times these texts feel slightly rushed over. Nevertheless, on the whole, this...