Steampunk: A Well-Dressed, Polite Rebellion
This was a paper I wrote as an undergrad at the University of Washington in 2013. It won the Wienkler Award for Best Undergraduate Anthropology Paper and I still talk about it from time to time. Some people have asked to read it so I decided to put it up here on Medium for ease of access. I still look upon this short project with fondness, and my heart and gratitude goes out to the Seattle Steamrats, who were some of the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever met. All personal names have been changed to protect anonymity.
The atrium of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry (MOHI) already looks like a postmodern pastiche of crass symbols of commercialism and its intersections with history. A Western cowboy mannequin stands behind a glass case next to a statue of a set of legs riding a unicycle. On top of the legs just tapering into a torso sits a massive bivalve sculpture. In between sits a large model of a Rainer beer bottle. A garish neon sign depicting a stylized silhouette of the Space Needle towers over the stage as its currents alternate between electric blue and fluorescent white.
Compounding the symbolic schizophrenia dominating the room, this particular night a sea of people heaves to and fro as bodies dressed in costumes ranging from intricate period pieces to outfits based on the surreal story of Alice in Wonderland move from area to area. On the stage, a band of four costumed musicians play a slow tango with a violin, a cello, an accordion, and a piano. Just minutes before, burlesque dancers moved purposefully on the stage, cheers erupting form the audience as they removed articles of clothing. This carnivalesque scene has convened consistently for the last four years in the name of the annual Steampunk Exhibition Ball.
A fundraiser for the Center of Sex Positive Culture, a non-profit organization with a community space for people to explore sexuality in a non-judgmental, safe setting, it seems odd that the steampunk subculture — which ranges from literary genre to a specific visual aesthetic based off of a re-interpretation of Victorian England history — would partner with a non-profit entity that openly promotes a bold and candid dialogue about sex, but the values of steampunk paradoxically mesh well with the Center’s. The expressive qualities and motivations of steampunk mirror those of more “edgy” subcultures like punk and goth, but take a very different tactic in critiquing movements in modern societies today.
Defining Steampunk
The journey that took me, an introverted, straight laced anthropology student, to a spectacular, large social event bursting with clashing color, boundary transgression, and playful eroticism finds its origins in my initial participant observation with a group of steampunk enthusiasts known as the Seattle Steamrats. A loose collection of people from diverse backgrounds, the Steamrats are one of the most active steampunk groups in the country and also one of the oldest. I attended regular meet-ups which occur every Monday at the Wayfarer Cafe in Seattle, where members meet for social interaction.
My desire to understand the steampunk culture was two-fold — from an academic standpoint, I wanted to understand how local subcultures in Seattle worked. Why do people identify with certain subcultures more than others, and what motivates people to invest no small amount of time and money into asserting or creating that identity through material production and consumption? But I was also personally drawn to the aesthetic itself; it intrigued me and I wanted to learn more. I knew ahead of time that steampunk derives from an alternate-historical version of Victorian England, where modern inventions such as mechanically-powered flight and computers were invented during the “Age of Steam.” As an Asian American, whom Victorian society and ideology would have considered inferior, subhuman, or uncivilized, I wanted to know how I could navigate what seemed a particularly dangerous and potentially painful minefield of racist colonial ideologies.
When I sat down for the first time with the Steamrats, I began to ask, “If I were to create an authentic steampunk costume — ”, but was cut off immediately by the group. In unison, everyone groaned or covered their faces. Several people shouted out with passion, “There’s no such thing as authentic!” which sparked a spirited discussion on the definitions of authenticity, of identity and expression, and the need to create rather than to simply consume. From this question, the entire ethos of steampunk burst out in a stream of arguments and words.
It is difficult for many of the Steamrats to define with concrete details what steampunk is. However, everyone had an opinion of what steampunk is not, and the answers stayed consistent from person to person. Steampunk was not just a fashion statement. Steampunk was not just gears or goggles. Steampunk was not just something you purchase. For all the steamrats (especially the established members) steampunk was a way of life, an expression of the self, a statement of identity.
Steampunk’s aesthetics, despite its preference for Victorian fashion, allows a wide space for wiggle room (Steamrat member Violet, a woman in her mid-twenties with long blonde hair and a new fashion project on her lap every week, emphasized the fact that they were steampunk and not the Victorian Re-enactment Society). Thus, many steampunk women wear corsets but also pants; hoop skirts but also top hats. Men, meanwhile, often stay within what Victorian England circumscribed as male fashion — overcoats, pants, shirts, hats, etc. However, this didn’t mean that individual fashion creativity was necessarily gendered as female; men also modified Victorian-era clothing, though they focused more on technological affects (such as fantastical mechanical devices or weaponry) than more “pure” aesthetic modifications or disrupting gender norms in Western dress.
But steampunk finds not just its visual roots within the Victorian era of the United Kingdom but also its ideological roots. While most Westerners probably do not consider the Victorian era’s values (often associated with prudishness, racism, imperialism, sexism, and repression of emotions) desirable for emulation, steampunk does not so much resurrect those values as much as plays with them, selecting what it wants and leaving behind the rest. For some critics, at best steampunk ignorantly peruses history and appropriates ideas and symbols without consideration for their historical significance; at its worst, it’s a perverse — even dangerous — mixing of fact and fiction, real with unreal, fantasy with reality. However, rather than simply picking out random elements with little afterthought, specific core motivations drive what gets picked up by steampunk and what does not.
Steampunk embraces the idea of progress as good, that the world is getting better everyday, that technology is a help and not a weapon, that adventure and exploration still exists in the world. In short, steampunk is optimism. However, notably absent are many of the racist ideologies used to justify colonialism or oppressive attitudes towards women. Just like how steampunk’s aesthetic roots still allowed a great deal of room for individual expression and improvisation, steampunk’s ideological roots take many of the concepts of the Victorian Enlightenment reserved for the privileged and makes them available to all who wish to join in.
This is not to say that the Steamrats blithely re-appropriated history without critical self-reflection. Many of the members were well versed in Victorian historical knowledge. Once, the group began to argue whether denim belonged in the category of Victorian, debating the dates of not only when denim was first invented and developed, but also when the classic blue dye was invented and mass produced in textile manufacturing. During the discussion, John, a machinist with thick curly black hair and a baseball cap, leaned over and said, “I’m not as knowledgable in history as them,” but then later joined in a different discussion, lecturing on historical developments in United Kingdom currency and coinage.
Along with the facts and dates, many of the women Steamrats are aware of the historical implications in re-appropriating and re-interpreting Victorian values. Women especially reported that subverting historical attitudes towards women rooted in a society popularly stereotyped for its repressive attitudes towards gender and sex provided a distinct pleasure. “We enjoy that we are altering history,” Dahlia, who could be considered the “den mother” of the Steamrats, told me. She also spoke of a friend of an ethnicity that Victorian society repressed with savage brutality. He engages in steampunk because he knew his ancestors could never participate fully in society and enjoy its benefits. For him, taking on this culture and playing with it took the power back into his own hands. “He can redress history,” she said with a smile, the pun fully intended. Not only could this person feel like he was rectifying the injustices played on his ancestors, but he literally took on the dress of the historical period once forbidden to bodies like his, re-dressing history.
This undercurrent of playful resistance I did not expect when I began my fieldwork. But resistance is woven into the very concept of steampunk. All of the Steamrats spoke of intense disappointment with specific aspects of broader “mainstream” U.S. culture, ranging from what Violet called sloppy fashion to what John called “our plastic disposable culture.” Almost all of the disappointments, however, could be summed up in two very large categories that for the Steamrats make up “mainstream” culture: post-modern pessimism and consumerist late-capitalism.
Resisting Post-modernist pessimism
In an ethnography detailing the religious practices and beliefs of an impoverished group in modern-day India, anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh comments:
“Our political theologies prompt our view of life. Strangely enough, in my scholastic neck of the woods, such is the view of life (or is it only a mode of feigning gravitas?) that it is harder for now to prompt a smile than it is to confirm a global catastrophe” (22).
This quote exemplifies what the Steamrats see as the current cultural disposition towards an almost gleeful pessimism. Many said it was not in their nature or personality to be pessimistic and often saw the world as an ultimately optimistic and hopeful place (mirroring the ideas of Hans Rosling, who, in a TED conference talk, highlighted that almost every nation has improved in many metrics used by the United Nations for quality of life over the last fifty years).
The development of postmodernism as a theory began quite pessimistic. Fredric Jameson’s work spoke of this new developing trend in dark terms, arguing that “the new cultural dominant, postmodernism, has triumphed, and first world culture has traded depth for surface, the possibility of egalitarian transformations for the excitement of constant but superficial change, feeling for an interdeterminate sense of euphoria and intensity, alienation for fragmentation, style of technological reproduction, and life for death” (Sandoval 25). Postmodernism, the manifestations of capitalism’s attempts to organize culture, creates a de-centered subject, one made up of multiple fragmented identities. This, according to many critics, creates anxiety, anomie, a life made up of surviving from moment to moment. However, Sandoval points out that while postmodernism may have profound effects on the lives of the privileged citizen-subject, postmodernism’s demand of living from “experience to experience is also a course of action demanded of those who hold against conditions of hunger, deprivation, humiliation, colonization and social subjection” (28).
Post-modernist and late-modernist thinkers critiqued the Victorian ideology of science as progress and progress as continual, especially during and after the horrors of World War I and World War II when technological advances in warfare inflicted horrific casualties both in quantity and quality on many different populations. Post-modernism especially saw modernism and Victorian Enlightenment ideologies as problematic (and rightly so), promoting ideas of racism, ethnocentrism, and colonialism which disrupted millions of peoples’ lives, often reducing them to the bare life, the life not worth saving (Agamben 124–5). Modernism fit all of human experience into a constructed grand narrative which left many either undefined and lost or abject to be “disciplined” out.
So it certainly can be troubling to say that steampunk could consider itself the Victorian Enlightenment’s counter-argument after years of dormant slumber induced by the philosophical beatings received at the hands of post-modernist thought. Re-tooling its message and shedding its more problematic assertions, this old ideology gets a face-lift for current generations. For myself, as a body considered “less than” in a society dominated by white bodies, this idea certainly gave me pause.
Steampunk’s ideological roots of Victorian Enlightenment philosophy, however, cannot be reduced to simple resurgence of old modes of power. Enlightenment philosophy strove to define what progress looked like and how it could be achieved. Steampunk’s “Neo-Enlightenment” focuses more on allowing those previously barred from enjoying progress to define what progress means to them and work to achieve it. The heavy participation of women in steampunk culture, the vast majority aware of the status of women in the past, speaks to this new Enlightenment, which opens up to everyone its philosophy of progress through exploration, adventure, intellect, learning and technology open to all.
Nor can steampunk really be termed as a resistance against post-modernism per se; the very act of reaching back into traditional modernism’s grand narrative and problematizing it in such a way that allows one to subvert modernism’s core values of stability through progress and enlightenment through the rational (i.e., white, male) mind to allow any ideology, lifestyle, or cultural expression is a very post-modern tactic. Just as late-capitalism tries to commoditize everything it can, steampunk can and will make anything steampunk. This perversity in its ability to infiltrate anything under the sun gives steampunk’s modernist sensibilities a very post-modernist feel.
This remixed modernism examines current post-modernism and asks the same question it struggled with in the mid-20th century: “What benefits to humanity have you to show for yourself?” Many see the post-modern predilection towards pessimism as unproductive or even counter-productive, viewing its fatalistic tendencies to see late-capitalism’s seemingly unstoppable ability to absorb any modes of resistance and commoditize them as encouraging people to shrug, lie down in the middle of the street, and resign themselves to a fate of oppression through state apparatuses and imbalanced power relations. Like Singh’s anthropologist colleagues, post-modern thinkers seem all too quick to declare global catastrophe rather than smile and look for productive spaces between the lines to exploit and flourish within.
Resisting neoliberal late-capitalism
One of those spaces of resistance steampunk culture emphasizes is do-it-yourself (DIY) or “maker” culture. All of the Steamrats insisted that steampunk was not just an identity one could purchase. Despite the initial cries of “there is no such thing as authentic!” by the crowd, there was one condition that violated attempts at authentic steampunk expression — if you only simply and passively consumed products made by somebody else to build your identity, “you’re doing it wrong,” Violet said with a smirk.
This did not mean that you could not purchase steampunk-themed items; many of the people there made supplementary or primary income off of selling steampunk related crafts. However, if one were to purchase anything steampunk-related, it better have been made by an individual and not by a machine. This contradiction of belief in progress through technology (exemplified and personified by the historical period’s domination through industrialized mass production and development) and a deep belief in maker culture also creates an interestingly paradoxical but productive strain within steampunk identification.
Like many of the punk subcultures spawned throughout the late-20th century (cf. Oakes), steampunk carries on the tradition of DIY culture, of rejecting the concept of building an identity through conspicuous consumption, of carefully purchasing the right objects and displaying them in a way that asserted your class, ethnicity, gender, dispositions, and so forth. One Steamrat, a fifty-year old woman named Daisy, lamented that when you look at someone’s Facebook profile, often times it’s dominated by the kinds of objects they consume (especially media) rather than anything they actually do (or create). Steampunk actively rejects the ultimate results of industrialization and mass production that the Victorian era propagated.
The steampunk ethos of items crafted by an individual and not piecemeal by an assembly line of workers or a machine mirrors the Marxist critique of capitalism’s separation of work from creation (and thus self-worth) which then intensified in the modern age into “abstract labor” where “high tech workers [who manipulate abstract signs as creative work] tend to consider labor as the most essential part in their lives, the most specific and personalized” (Berardi 76) despite feeling a profound sense of disconnect from their work’s results.
Steampunk also echoes Walter Benjamin’s cultural criticism of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Lamenting the loss of what he considered the aura of a work imbued by the creator, he questions what it means to create art in an age where that art could be produced identically en masse and then distributed to anyone who wished to use it for various reasons other than aesthetic experience. Benjamin argued that aesthetic experience was once deeply rooted also in space, and this space often was carefully constructed to accentuate or emphasize the art itself. For Benjamin, this loss of aura and context destroys the very idea of the classic aesthetic experience.
While following the same logic of consumerist late-capitalism by using (and performing) objects to assert identity, steampunk also attempts to re-inject Benjamin’s aura into the object. Many costumes are made from scratch, steampunk artisans buying the raw materials and assembling them personally, adding their own expressive flair. Some become inventors of their own right; John is developing his own steam-powered car, while another, Tom, built a giant steampunk-inspired art piece that represented an iron dragon that breathed real fire. Many of these artisans also modify existing consumer products, such as tablets, computers, and smartphones to incorporate a steampunk neo-Victorian aesthetic and design. The company Datamancer made a huge splash and profit by modifying computers, laptops, and computer accessories such as keyboards to aesthetically mimic old typewriters. Steampunk does not feel it has to reject the conveniences of late-capitalism as much as subvert them to become an expression of the self through creative craft and not simply through passive consumption.
Play, not War
Up to this point, I have not yet demonstrated how steampunk differentiates itself from other subculture movements like the punk movement of the 1970s or the goth movement of recent decades other than through aesthetic design. Donna Haraway’s classic “Cyborg Manifesto” imagines and informs much of the soul and motivations behind many different iterations of “punk aesthetic.” Haraway writes of the post-gender future as the metaphorical cyborg which consistently transgresses boundaries of organic and inorganic, male and female, of race and ethnicity and differentiated bodies. Underpinning all of this is the cyborg’s desire to fix its exclusive gaze on the future and resist trying restore an idyllic past: “the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden,” nor does it “recognize the Garden of Eden” (Haraway 151).
Rather than looking for clues in the past, Haraway argues any productive subculture must push forward for the future to avoid returning to the shackles that lie in history for many marginalized groups (Haraway, as a feminist, especially focuses on the various oppressions of women). This cyborg tendency to violate continuity-via-tradition, both historical and mythological, by continually transgressing boundaries, has driven many subcultures towards a kind of nihilistic futurism that emanates a flavor of post-modern bleakness.
Contrast, therefore, the aesthetic of cyberpunk (which often envisions a dystopian, corporation-dominated world where the mind could completely separate from the body in cyberspace and weaker, lesser minds find themselves trapped within a complex network of physical distractions and immaterial pleasures) with the aesthetic of steampunk, which the Steamrats described as “warm,” “inviting,” “elegant,” “natural, not manufactured,” and “full of whimsy.” Steampunk attempts to disrupt the current hegemonic ideologies by reaching to their historical origins and smashing them open in productive ways. Rather than challenging open ideologies (which prefer to stay hidden and naturalized) by shocking them into the public’s collective consciousness as many punk subcultures do, steampunk instead believes in a different way for resisting undesirable ideologies — by deploying what I call ironic play. Steampunk exposes undesirable aspects of current ideology through a “polite” but still productive, ironic, and disruptive play with the past.
Steampunk and the carnival
The terms “polite” or “play” are not to suggest that steampunk acts the role of the meek model minority subculture (though elements of this do exist among many members). These two critiques against post-modernist pessimism and late-capitalist consumer practices during the Steampunk Exhibition Ball explode into a carnival of colors and a perverse mixing of aesthetic and symbolic boundaries, as suggested by Haraway’s manifesto. Gazing from the mezzanine into the atrium, I record the different kinds of costumes that caught my eye. Though many of the costumes still find inspiration in Victorian fashion, some of them have been twisted and mixed into an almost unrecognizable collage of styles. Elements from the goth, emo, dieselpunk, and even cyberpunk subcultures blend in with Victorian corsets, petticoats, and top hats. One man wore a torn military jacket and jeans, but sported a water gun modified to look as if it’s been built out of brass and copper wire. The traditional visual elements of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland narrative inspired many costumes, from the ubiquitous Mad Hatter’s hat to one girl dressed as a steampunk version of the Queen of Hearts. One woman wore a pair of hand-made wings built out of copper and brass framing and feathers, a futurist take on the mythological Icarus. Other style elements mixed in include the 1920s flapper fashion, military fashion from the 1940s, and even more “foreign” elements such as fashion inspired by the Ottoman Empire or Tokugawa Japan.
Along with fashion, mainstream U.S. values on sex and the female body were subverted via burlesque performance by professional dancers through the spectacular performance Mikhail Bakhtin calls the carnival, where “the laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended” (122–3). Summarized as “free and familiar contact among people, the free expression of latent sides of human nature in eccentric conduct…, profanations, and carnival misalliances,” the carnival allows “the combining and uniting of the most disparate and ill-associated things” (Carlson 28) in a productive way that challenges and expands on current ideologies. Victor Turner calls this liminoid play, a productive space in which the regular rules of society are suspended and productive play that challenges the status quo occurs (ibid 23–24).
However, one must ask the question of whether steampunk’s liminal space a productive one. On the one hand, when I asked what I as an Asian specifically could create that had a steampunk theme, people refused to tell me what to do outside of (1) do your research on Victorian fashion, and (2) express yourself. While I could explain this as a group of mostly white men and women keen in trying to avoid reproducing the old power dynamics in which European nations went to non-white peoples (like those in Asia) and told them how they need to dress, act, and speak in order to belong to a more civilized order, judging from their initial outburst, the Steamrats seem genuinely reluctant to tell anyone how to be steampunk. Just the fact that many of the Steamrats (as white bodies) were even aware of this tragic history would seem impressive to some in its own right.
But as I observed the parade of costumes at the Steampunk Exhibition Ball, I paid close attention to how race would play into this social carnival performance. Outside of myself, I noticed only a few non-white bodies in the crowd; most of them were women. All of us (myself included) chose to underplay any specific steampunk elements, instead choosing to wear generic and inoffensive “dapper” (as one Steamrat put it) clothes rather than play up any overtly Victorian elements or symbols. Only one person ventured outside of modern fashion sensibilities — a young Asian woman dressed up as the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland. I found it telling that this one brave soul who decided to venture outside the careful lines we as minorities learned to live within chose to do so by tapping into fictional literature rather than historical inspiration and animalizing herself with exaggerated mouse ears and a tail. Meanwhile, many of the costumes that incorporated historical non-Victorian elements (such as Japan and the Ottoman Empire) were worn by white bodies. While theoretically the steampunk ethos invites all to enjoy Enlightenment progress and freedom, it may take some time for others to feel truly included and venture out to heed the call.
Still, steampunk’s emphasis on resistance through play rather than shock value makes its appealing message, ethos, aesthetic, and lifestyle more palatable to those who feel they would have more to lose if they join more shock-oriented subcultures. And while steampunk’s genial Victorian sensibilities might make it seem like a fluffy, model minority subculture with little teeth, underneath that polite exterior roils an active resistance against oppressive and destructive ideologies prevalent in current post-modern, post-industrialized societies.
Steampunk, as an expressive culture, allows bodies considered abject or unintelligible to give expression of their very existence. More than an aesthetic or a reaction against specific contemporary trends, steampunk is a medium that allows one to express their existence, their vitality, their bios, rather than just their zoe (Agamben 1–2). Daisy understands this on a personal level; her entry into steampunk began in her late 40s and early 50s, when women her age, as she put it, were expected to “just fade into the background.” Daisy didn’t want to fade and found herself holding back an aggressive desire to lash out, to throw herself in front of people in resistance. But “regular” punk’s dada-esque aesthetic seemed too crass for her.
But then she found steampunk. As Daisy told me one evening, “We’re just the most polite, best dressed punks you’ll ever meet. But we’re still punks at heart.”
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken, 1969.
Berardi, Franco. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Bhaktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helen Iswolki. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.
Calrson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Oakes, Kaya. Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture. New York City, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2009.
Rosling, Hans. “The Good News of the Decade?” www.ted.com/talks. TED Conferences, LLC. October 2010. Web. March 9 2013.
Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Singh, Bhirigupati. “The Headless Horseman of Central India: Sovereignty at Varying Thresholds of Life.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 27 no 2, pp. 383–407.
