STEAMPUNK: REVOLUTION
Steampunk is a very visual and materially oriented subculture. A sentiment I often hear is, “How would you steampunk that?” “That” being anything: how do you steampunk Chinese culture? How do you steampunk your clothes? How do you steampunk your food? (Jury’s still out on the last one.) Where do you buy this, how did you modify that, where did the materials to build such-and-such come from…? These are all questions that are common in steampunk spaces. It is easy to imagine, not so easy to enact.
But what does all this have to do with revolution? Historically, revolutions are a replacement of one kind of hierarchy for another kind of hierarchy. So long as any group places a premium on power and hoards resources, there can be no meaningful replacement of hierarchies. Revolutions often happen in too short a time, on too shallow a scale, for everyone to truly benefit from any change in management.
Steampunks have loud ambitions of taking over the world, but our methods of doing so are to toddle around with mostly munitions props and spout the same rhetoric that diminishes the presence of the marginalized from the picture. The strength of steampunk communities do not come from these posturings. They do not even come from the prettiness of the people. That’s all show. The fact that steampunks often exchange money buying each other’s products is often a show of support for the community. That’s all business.
Steampunks often share time, know-how and resources with each other. This is a community aspect that many comfortable people take for granted as we turn to monetary exchange value to determine our investment in people. It is, however, very much a survival mechanism for various marginalized communities. Without each other, we quickly sink. Isolated in the mainstream, we are marked for death. Sharing to create beauty is an exercise for the privileged, but it is also an action that can be extended above and beyond.
There is value in practical hands-on skills and the benefits of sharing work-space, of being around other people to build and cultivate friendships and community. There is a muted necessity of human contact to acknowledge and take note of one’s existence. Some of the arguably most popular people and active groups in steampunk demonstrate this: every fan of Jake von Slatt’s Steampunk Workshop site bows to his skills and know-how, but Jake von Slatt remains just a man who decided to share everything he’s doing with random people on the Internet. Airship Archon of Columbus, Ohio, is a group that comes together every once in a while to have a “Build Day,” which goes beyond a meet-and-greet to bring people together with any current projects to share and get help with. The most radical part of this work, then, is not gaining all this knowledge and spreading it around. Rather, it is the work of gathering the sum of all this knowledge, and remembering it to the many who have been asked, told, even commanded, to forget it all.
There is a reason why the world order of capitalist consumerism constructs systems defined by monetary value, encourages hyper-individualism, consistently distracts us with new must-have technology, rewards bigotry, and punishes critique: beware the peoples who have learned to understand each other, work with one another, share what little they have, and build their own worlds. Beware the peoples who can see beyond props, fashion, performance and rhetoric, and know how to use them all. Beware the peoples keenly aware of how to identify history’s repeated cycles. We are not just in our airy-fairy airships of imagination, but in the plumbing and machinery of the world, the urban forests and suburban sprawls.
Some descend, some rise, and beware the peoples who do this together.
CITATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
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Past so we can Dream the Future.” Steampunk Magazine #1. March 3, 2007.
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Eds. Nikki Alfar and Kate Osias. Kestrel DDM, 2011. Alternative Alamat. Ed. Paolo
Chikiamco. Rocket Kapre, 2011.
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French, Marilyn. From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World. Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002.
FWD/Forward: Feminists with Disabilities for a way forward. DISABLEDFEMINISTS.COM
Garlick, Steve. “What Is a Man? Heterosexuality and the Technology of Masculinity.” Men and Masculinities 6:2 (October 2003): 156–172.
Hassani, Massoud. “Mine Kafon.” MINEKAFON.BLOGSPOT.CA
Isang Litrong Liwanag (1 Liter of Light.) ISANGLITRONGLIWANAG.ORG
Jemisin, N. K. “The Effluent Engine.” Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft. Torquere Press, 2011. 3–37.
Kurji, Zuleikha. “Adaptive Eyewear: Glimpsing the Obvious.” Science 2.0. 15 October 2009.
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ADAPTIVE _ EYEWEAR _ GLIMPSING _ OBVIOUS _ 1
Pho, Diana and Jaymee Goh. “Steampunk: Stylish Subversion and Colonial Chic.” Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style. Eds. Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles. SUNY Press, September 2012.
Poirier, Monique. “Musing about Native Steampunk.” Moniquilliloquies. 19 December 2011. MONIQUILL.TUMBLR.COM/POST/14393053317/MUSING-ABOUT-NATIVE-STEAMPUNK
Studio Needs Must. “Hacking Hope: Consequences of Design.” Netherlands, 2011. STUDIONEEDSMUST.COM/INTRO/INDEX.HTML
The Technium. “Amish Hackers.” 10 February 2009. WWW.KK.ORG/THETECHNIUM/ARCHIVES/2009/02/AMISH _ HACKERS _ A.PHP
EVERYTHING CHANGES, AND Steampunk is no exception.
Looking in from the outside, it’s easy to spot all the trappings that would lead someone to believe that Steampunk is a movement that is made up of people who want to live in the past. After all, Steampunk is full of women in restrictive corsets, men wearing impractical outfits, and outdated technology. None of that has anything to do with the present, right?
In reality, the idea that Steampunks live in the past couldn’t be more wrong. The Steampunk movement not only embraces change, but at its heart, the movement embodies change.
When I first became aware of Steampunk as more than just a few novels and films, the year was 2006 and people were just beginning to wear Steampunk costumes. Like so many others, I was immediately taken by the intricacy and beauty of the clothing and props. They were unlike anything I’d ever seen in the costuming world, full of brass and leather and gadgets and gizmos.
Before Steampunk came along, the sort of costuming done at fan conventions like DragonCon or San Diego Comic-Con was movie-replica stuff. The idea was to create a costume that closely matched a character, such as Captain Jack Sparrow or Superman, in order to emulate and embody that character. It’s an extremely rigorous, time-consuming activity, and the people who are seriously involved in it are very skilled craftspeople. The problem, though, is that there is no real creativity in it; the designs are already done!
Many of the very first people who jumped to make impressive Steampunk outfits were already members of the costuming community, but had gotten tired of the lack of creativity involved in emulating premade designs. For example, Danny Ashby of Outland Armour, whose work inspired many early Steampunks, got his start making costumes like Spawn or Boba Fett, and Thomas Willeford of Brute Force Leather used to dress up as Thor or Wolverine before his Steampunk work awed millions. In many ways, those first costumers were pioneers. Most of them had never read a Steampunk book in their lives, and were instead drawing on old Scientific Romances from the Victorian era (or often the films based on them) and using a liberal dash of their own imaginations. It was at this time that the airship pirate became a cliché; it was the go-to Steampunk costume and no one really had much of a chance to think of any others.
Steampunk was very misunderstood at that point, not only by the outside, but by the very people who were doing it. After all, those first pioneers in Steampunk costuming weren’t considering the social or
political ramifications of what they were doing; most of them just wanted to make cool costumes!
However, as the pictures of these costumers began to spread across the Internet, an amazing thing happened: People responded. It was as if a lightbulb (or carbon-filament lamp, if you prefer) suddenly turned on as people began to realize that they, too, could partake in this hobby. No longer would they have to look like any specific actor or character, and as an added bonus, they could even express themselves creatively. The Internet practically exploded with posts and pictures about this new thing, Steampunk.
Many of the people who became involved in Steampunk at that time weren’t aware that Steampunk (in other artistic forms) had been around for many years. I frequently cite the television show The Wild, Wild West (1965) as the first example of the Steampunk genre, but there were many similar films around that time, including The Great Race and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that also embodied a Steampunk aesthetic. Of course, it wasn’t until 1987 that author K. W. Jeter coined the term “Steampunk,” but again, most early Steampunks had no idea of that.
As the movement gained more and more popularity, an interesting phenomenon arose: People began arguing about Steampunk on the Internet. What exactly was Steampunk, and what did it mean? It had become popular so quickly that there had been no time to develop an ideology or philosophy, so the movement was suddenly swamped with many people who loved Steampunk yet had no idea what it was or what it was about.
The first theories focused mainly on the Victorian aspect of Steampunk, because that was the most easily-identifiable visual aspect. Clearly, Steampunks love the Victorian era. After all, it was a time of exploration and adventure, when the world was larger and so were the machines. The industrial revolution was changing the world, and mainstream society was convinced that the future held great things. For lack of an alternative theory, many people found themselves agreeing with the simplicity and allure of that explanation.
However, that simply wasn’t a broad enough explanation to encompass all of Steampunk and that became clear as the costumes started to move further and further away from historical accuracy. For example, women wearing skimpy outfits made exclusively of strategically-placed belts were hardly something that would have been seen during the Victorian era (at least in public!), and yet there was still something inherently Steampunk about them. How could you capture the essence of Steampunk without wearing a Victorian outfit if Steampunk was primarily about the Victorian era? The answer, of course, was that you couldn’t.
It didn’t help that the very idea of romanticizing the Victorian era was problematic, because the real Victorian era was a rather harsh place. Not only was it physically very dirty, it was also a time of unapologetic oppression, subjugation, child labor, and colonialism. Many of those things still go on, and it pained early Steampunks to think that they may have in some way been unintentionally endorsing them.
While some of us struggled to come to terms with our own movement, it went right on moving without us. The airship-pirate cliché could only last for so long, and as more and more people got involved with costuming, the very creativity that drew them to Steampunk also drew them on to forge new territory for themselves. Soon we had Steampunk miners, doctors, scientists, soldiers, and every other occupation that could be expressed visually, along with some that couldn’t. But it didn’t stop there; it spread out even further and began to encompass other forms of media by “Steampunking” them. We had Steampunk Star Wars, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, and many, many more. People were combining their favorite fandoms with Steampunk and turning what used to be simple emulation into unique creations.
It was around this time that it became apparent that Steampunk, as a movement, wasn’t really about the past at all, but about the present. The example I started with was of the costumers who wanted more creativity in their work, but there are many different reasons why people come to Steampunk; trying to shoehorn everyone into the same box just isn’t feasible or productive or even desirable. Some people come to Steampunk because modern commercial design is extremely minimalist, and they crave more aesthetic variety. Some come because they want to make things with their hands and Steampunk gives them that opportunity. Steampunk resonates with people because of a shared anxiety about technology, and easily understandable machines help people come to terms with their lack of control over our nigh-incomprehensible modern machines.
These are just a small sampling of reasons why people come to Steampunk, and those reasons also include reactions to mass production, planned obsolescence, lack of etiquette, devaluation of education, increased casualization, and many more, but no single one of them describes everyone. Additionally, you may have noticed that although all these issues are unique, none of them have anything to do with the past; they’re all things that society is dealing with right here and now in the present. As that realization slowly spread throughout the community, it rocked the Steampunk movement. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief that their cool costumes weren’t unintentionally glorifying atrocities, but then they realized that if Steampunk is about the present, wouldn’t that mean that they had a responsibility to make the present a better place?
Soon Steampunks began trying to do exactly that, and it became commonplace to do everything from raising money for charity to pushing for greater acceptance of all races and genders both inside and outside the movement. Miriam Rosenberg Rocek, who is also known as Steampunk Emma Goldman, performs at political rallies, petitioning for women’s rights, among other things, and Noam Berg, a musician known as Painless Parker, writes and plays songs that are against class-based discrimination. Once a few brave and vocal individuals started spreading these messages, the waves rippled outward in an ever-increasing radius, drawing more and more people who were already socially active into the movement. Now nearly every Steampunk convention in America holds fund-raisers for the charities that they support, such as Atlanta’s AnachroCon with Reading Is Fundamental, or New Jersey’s Steampunk World’s Fair with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Some conventions even host discussions about how to use Steampunk to enact social change. It’s clear that a pattern had emerged that showed Steampunk changing from a simple aesthetic toward a primarily liberal, socially progressive movement that’s working to create a better world.
This may seem like it was a fairly straightforward and logical progression, but as is always the case with change, it doesn’t happen everywhere simultaneously. This story starts with the costumers because costuming is where the genre or aesthetic of Steampunk transitioned into a full-fledged movement. Of course people around the world had been making Steampunk art, sculptures, and novels for years by the time the costumers really got involved with the scene, but those early artists and writers had mostly languished in obscurity until Steampunk made the leap into costuming. The very nature of costuming as a participatory activity was what most helped it take off, because people could see themselves in those outfits.
The books, comics, and movies that are considered Steampunk are an entirely different phenomenon than the costuming, and part of what makes them different is exactly what makes most Steampunks so socially conscious. Books and movies tell a complete story—context already included—but costumes have no inherent context other than the real world in which they are worn. In book or movie form, that context is what provides the relief from reality that many call escapism. Due to a lack of a Steampunk “canon” for people to emulate, everyone who participates in Steampunk costuming has to create his or her own personal context. With no shared space of interaction, all of us have to participate in the real world rather than in a fantasy world of our own imagining. That’s why Steampunk is expression rather than escape, and once people are participating in the real world, it’s only a short step to addressing real-world issues.
Steampunk is more than just a bunch of people running around in strange clothes; it’s a part of the extensive dialogue between this generation and its accompanying mainstr
eam culture. It represents all the problems in modern societies not just in America but around the world, and it’s a way of acting out and telling everyone in a very visual way that we want more than what we’ve been given. We’re the disillusioned and the dissatisfied, and Steampunk is our revolution.
I’d like to thank the following editors, writers, and creators who shared their work with me, inspired me, and/or pointed me in the right direction: Margaret Killjoy, Jess Nevins, Selena Chambers, Rosemary Lim, Maisarah Bte Abu Samah, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Scott Andrews, Zachary Ricks, Bart Leib, Phillip E. Carroll, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, James Carrott, Byrd MacDonald, Diana Pho, Emma Goldman, Sean Wallace, Stephen Segal, Paula Guran, Liz Gorinsky and John Coulthart. In addition, many thanks to Tessa Kum, Dominik Parisien, and Alan Swirsky for continuing on as editorial assistants on various projects. And of course to my husband, Jeff VanderMeer, who inspires me in so many ways each and every day.
Christopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying postindustrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan. His stories have appeared in a many venues, including Nerve, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Interfictions, Asimov’s, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, won the Crawford Award. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. He is the coeditor of Interfictions 2 and has done Japanese-English translation on Kant: For Eternal Peace, a peace theory book published in Japan for Japanese teens. Forthcoming in August 2012, his story collection Birds and Birthdays will be published by Aqueduct Press. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.
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