Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright » (1)

Caren Irr is professor in the Department of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s and coeditor of On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization and Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique.

Today, copyright is everywhere, surrounded by a thicket of no trespassing signs that mark creative work as private property. Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates asks how contemporary novelists—represented by Ursula Le Guin, Andrea Barrett, Kathy Acker, and Leslie Marmon Silko—have read those signs, arguing that for feminist writers in particular copyright often conjures up the persistent exclusion of women from ownership. Bringing together voices from law schools, courtrooms, and the writer's desk, Irr shows how some of the most inventive contemporary feminist novelists have reacted to this history. 

 Explaining the complex, three-century lineage of Anglo-American copyright law in clear, accessible terms and wrestling with some of copyright law's most deeply rooted assumptions, Irr sets the stage for a feminist reappraisal of the figure of the literary pirate in the late twentieth century—a figure outside the restrictive bounds of U.S. copyright statutes. 

 Going beyond her readings of contemporary women authors, Irr’s exhaustive history of how women have fared under intellectual property regimes speaks to broader political, social, and economic implications and engages digital-era excitement about the commons with the most utopian and materialist strains in feminist criticism.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The problem of Copyright 1

1 A Feminist History of Copyright: 1710 to 2010 17

2 The Maternal Commons: Reyher, Kroeber, and Le Guin 55

3 Appropriating Inuit Fashions: From Donna Karan to the Scientific Fictions of Andrea Barrett 77

4 Obscenity versus Freedom of Speech: The Outside of Ownership in Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates 105

5 Transracial Parody: 2 Live Crew Meets Leslie Marmon Silko 133

Conclusion: Toward a Pink Commons 159

Notes 167

Bibliography 195

Index 215