![]() ![]() The far more interesting “second wave” of steampunk, especially the emergence of a countercultural community, began around 2006-perhaps not coincidentally, soon after the appearance of the iPhone, a now-ubiquitous device that typifies the opaque, inaccessible, and depersonalized nature of today’s consumer technologies. During the 1990s, it remained a tiny fanboy culture based mainly in science fiction and graphic novels. This demarcates the “first wave” of American steampunk. Wells are commonly cited as its earliest progenitors, but its name comes from a letter that novelist K. Steampunk’s lengthy history might help to characterize it. However, Miéville himself insists he had only a vague notion of what steampunk was when he wrote it, and he politely distances himself from its categorization as such. Similarly, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), which many consider to be the quintessential steampunk novel, takes place in the horrifying Dickensian city of New Crobuzon, a thinly disguised 19th-century London. “There’s no scary steampunk.” Yet Gibson’s novel, widely acknowledged as a foundational steampunk text, ends with a mechanical (not digital) computer achieving sinister sentience as a social panopticon. ![]() “Steampunk strikes me as the least angry quasi-bohemian manifestation I’ve ever seen,” he has said. Even William Gibson-co-author of The Difference Engine (1990), a dystopian alternate transnational history of the Victorian era-has evinced skepticism about the nature of the genre. This adds to the problem of defining the movement satisfactorily. Steampunk has its critics, ironically including some of its literary paragons. The Grand Elephant at the steampunk park Les Machines de l’île, Nantes, France. In this way, studded leather corsets worn on the outside of steampunk women’s clothing become weaponized assertions of self-assured sexuality even as they also allude subversively to the garment’s literal imprisonment of bourgeois women’s bodies during the 19th century. For many of its subcultural advocates, steampunk’s shrewd juxtapositions of disparate historical contexts with speculative or adapted technologies serve as “ethical spectacles” that represent resistance and transgression in the present. American studies scholar Rebecca Onion has referred to steampunk as a “ multitextual aesthetic,” an empty mold into which any number of things can be poured, depending on the purposes and ideologies of those who employ it. ![]() Detractors often dismiss it as an ephemeral consumer trend. To some, it is primarily an underground movement, perhaps with anarchist leanings (hence, the “punk” in steampunk). ![]() Those who sneer at steampunk often emphasize the moment when the corporate mainstream temporarily commodified the movement’s aesthetic.ĭefining steampunk is difficult, however, eluding even committed practitioners. Moreover, besides its striking visual characteristics, we might also consider steampunk a novel and popular way of “doing” history. Steampunk can figure as literary trope, DIY craft, or mainstream fashion. Steampunk also has an international footprint-the French, in particular, have a thriving steampunk community, including a theme park in Nantes. There are steampunk bands, and steampunk conventions draw thousands of people annually to far-flung cultural centers such as Atlanta and Seattle, as well as to less likely locales such as Bloomington, Indiana, and Lafayette, Louisiana. Steampunk literature has grown so vast that it has developed its own subgenres, from alternate histories and social commentary to graphic novels and erotica. But steampunk also has a wider countercultural presence. ![]()
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