Engineering and Punk

So, I was browsing Instructables to think of a sweet gift for my girlfriend for the holidays (I ended up making her this steel bird) and stumbled across all of this steampunk stuff (I know, I know, I’m way behind the times). From a gender perspective, I think this is so interesting because punk is generally a masculine domain (and I’m a huge fan of the early ’90s feminist response to punk music known as riot grrrl).

Wikipedia describes steampunk as

The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

And a host of other engineering related punk genres which show up in sci-fi/fantasy as a derivative of cyberpunk.

Of course, I started to wonder how women fit into steampunk and found this interested thread at the Gaslamp Bazaar regarding feminism and steampunk. One comment struck me in particular:

Furthermore, the Victorian era was not just about tightly laced corsets and women as objects. It also witnessed the birth of feminism and of anarchism. Society always has an undercurrent of rebellion — against political oppression, economic oppression, sexual oppression. As steampunks, we should stand with the rebels.

Although I would argue that in terms of gender, punk as a whole hasn’t been particularly rebellious. It’s one thing to claim to be anti-sexism and another to ensure that women’s voices are heard and listened to. I think that the people in that thread want steampunk to be feminist even though there are large parts of it that are not.

As Karen Cadora explains in her article “Feminist Cyberpunk”, cyberpunk (and steampunk) is by default male. Women are forced to create their own space within cyberpunk to explore feminist themes. Because of course, feminism is a women’s issue. Pretty rebellious.

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