Today's #RomancingtheGothic lecture is STEAMPUNK with @CarolineDuvezin - so excite! It's repeated at 7pm BST so ask @RomGothSam if you want the Zoom link. It's free, like all the lectures and talks.
Dr Caroline Duvezin:
CW// sexual assault, rape, abusive relationships, mass deaths/genocide, mutilation (as part of colonial oppression of slaves in Belgian Congo), and historical foot-binding.
#RomancingtheGothic: "Steampunk is what happens when Goths discover brown" - Jess Nivens.

"Steampunk is Victorian Science Fiction" - G. D. Falksen

Well, it's more than that.
1st wave Steampunk: the Californian Trinity

Morlock Night by K. W. Jeter inspired by Henry Mayhew and H. G. Wells (Arthur reincarnated and time travelling through centuries).

The Anubis Gates (1983) by Tim Powers, set in 1810.

Homunculus (1986) by James P. Blaylock
Jeter wrote a letter to Locus in 1987, coining the term 'steampunks' in a joking homage to cyberpunk.

Steampunk fiction sometimes uses alt hist with points of divergence to create new alt presents and pasts.
2008 - anthology looking back at steampunk:

"Steampunk" eds the Vandermeers (who also did a collection of Weird fic)

2009: 2nd wave Steampunk

Cherie Priest, Boneshaker
Gail Carriger, Soulless
Scott Westerfield, Leviathan
1534 is the point of divergence for Carriger's world, where Reformation was Henry 8 accepting vamps and werewolves into society so broke with the Church in order to do so. Society shaped this way from this point on.
Fashion and gadgetry followed, with music and film, to create the aesthetic. Steampunk for Perschon is an aesthetic, a description that allows for it to be neither elitist/exclusive nor needlessly inclusive. It is not an empty aesthetic but can be filled with layers of ur choice.
Dr Mike Perschon - view steampunk as a genre using different lenses that slide together.

Techno-Fantasy (looks like science works like magic)
Retro-Futurism (how we imagine the past imagining the future)
Hyper-Vintage (yesteryear)

-Steampunk is the middle of this Venn diagram.
Empty aesthetic does not mean meaningless.

You can look at it through a colonial lens, which problematises elements for readers and viewers. E.g. the pith helmet, a part of colonial dress and problematic for its subtext and implicit connections.
I: Technofantasy
Science, Magic and Generic Boundaries

Lines are blurred in SpecFic [speculative fiction] where genres are harder to define due to shared elements and tropes, mashups and so on.

Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently advanced tech = indistinguishable from magic.
Ted Chiang: "roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it's science, and if you can't, it's magic... Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you're a person... when the universe responds to you in a personal way"
Aether = classical element that is used by steampunk works.

Cavorite is another element used in works, this one is fictional and invented by H. G. Wells for 'The First Men on the Moon' (1901)
Aetheric Airways - from the Soulless manga

Concept of preternatural people being soulless, aether is a way to build the world but also to build ties between people. Conception of werewolf packs bound to each other, vamp hives bound to queen & territory, ghosts bound to bodies.
Mannerpunk: popularised in 1990s and modelled on Comedy of Manners (a la Austen's Pride & Prejudice). About understanding manners and conventions that create social order.
Ursula Le Guin - Technology is how a soc copes w/ physical reality... [it is] the active human interface with the material world.

Other mannerpunk e.g.s

Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner (1987)
His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (2006)
Mary Robinette Kowal's series, 2010-15, deconstructing imperialism and ending with an inversion of the White Saviour narrative.

Phil & Kaja Foglio's series @girlgenius 2001-present (webcomic also available in print, my personal fave)
This is where we come into 'gaslamp fantasy' - more than steam, not so much punk.

Fantasy with technobabble that doesn't try too hard to be scientific, like Carriger's series...

Terry Pratchett: SciFi is fantasy with bolts painted on outside.
Question Break!!

Reminder that if you support monthly via http://www.ko-fi.com/SamHirst  then this monies also goes to Saturday speakers.
II: Punking History, Restoring Reality?
Divergence Points, DIY Technology and Gender

Kicking off Part II with Mark Hodder's series 2010-15, which has CW// sexual assault for the next tweet

[the villain is Victorian bogeyman Spring Heeled Jack]
CW// sexual assault

Spring Heeled Jack leapt out at women, tore their clothes, sexually assaulted them, bounded off over fences etc.

He's the main villain of the series.
Hodder operates on an alt timeline with apparent anachronisms.

10 June 1840, Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria. Spring Heeled Jack in this series = time travelling descendant of Edward Oxford.
Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home ... restorative nostalgia doesn't think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.... Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia
-calls it into doubt. (Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. xviii)

Avoiding the rape/sexual assault spoilers in Hodder's series in this thread but the plot summary (with TW) is in the recording.
Restorative nostalgia can be bad, in the sense of trying to fix history, in this villain's case from a white cishet male POV, and creates more horrors for other characters rather than solve problems.
Automata as Objects/Subjects of desire

Some clear analogies here with the (living) female body.

New CW for sexual assault and abusive relationships for Ekaterina Sedia's book, THE ALCHEMY OF STONE/L'ALCHEMIE DE LA PIERRE.
The Automaton in this book gets pleasure from being wound up (built-in to her by her creator), and she feels violated when he winds her up in public. The relationship is about her wanting to have the key so she can have bodily autonomy. It is a deeply sad book without an HEA.
Shweta Narayan, 'The Padisha Begum's Reflections', Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories Vol. I (2011)

Inspired by/related to Mahabharata, a romantic love story.
Working Woman by Olivia Ho - CW// genocide, mass murder, body horror/mutilation

Story in THE SEA IS OURS, eds Joyce Chng & Jaymee Goh (2015), Tales of Steampunk in Southeast Asia

Ah Hong is a Frankenstein's Creature of body parts from women killed in a big accident...
Asking permission/getting consent for working on another person's body, issues around this are exposed in situs where chars are chimeras or automata/cyborgs etc.

Cf. A Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Haraway
Girl Geniuses: some books to read:

A Dead Djinn in Cairo (Egypt set)
The Effluent Engine (Haiti set)

More in the Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories collection!!
Last point to address: restoration as a way to address technology linked to medicine. This involves considering atrocities in history, inc. King Leopold II's reign over the Congo Free State, so CW// for genocide, mass murder, colonial/imperial acts of violence
Nisi Shawl's EVERFAIR looks at this, is not about erasing horrors of history but reimagining ways of dealing with pain and restoring bodily autonomy by (in this specific case) steampunk prosthesis provided to slaves who had their limbs amputated.
Similarly, Jeannie Lin's GUNPOWDER ALCHEMY looks at the opium wars, addiction and footbinding.

"When they saw the Han women and their tiny golden lotuses, the rebels tore away the bindings and shouted for them to walk. They were free now, walk! Ignorant bastards thought-
-our feet would simply regain their shape."

(Taiping Rebellion 1850-1864).

Steampunk boots using acupuncture to enable the character to walk without pain and stand tall, but also she liked her tiny feet and so it's a complex thing presented with nuance and layers.
E.E. Ottoman - A Matter of Disagreement (2014) - the marquis is a trans man, book explores interaction with steampunk tech and gender. In Ottoman's world, there's no homophobia; but there is transphobia. (this is #OwnVoices).
Question Break 2!!

So many examples and some heavy content warnings around the historical realities explored and reimagined in that section... time for a breather before Part III.

Again, support the Saturday speakers by subscribing monthly to http://www.ko-fi.com/SamHirst 
The Q&A currently is discussing some of the series mentioned in more detail, gender-balancing and the books and lenses/perspectives by authors of colour, LGBTQ+ authors.

About to go into Part III.
Part III: Power Sources & Difference Engines
Alternate Futures?

Looking at French Steampunk, mostly started in 2009, kicking off with a look at Pieere Pevel's series in alt Paris, set 1909. Trilogy pubbed in 00s, book 1 pubbed 2003. Pevel presents an imagined Belle Epoque Paris
-where there is a connection with a magical Fae city, so the Eiffel Tower is made of white wood that sings(?) and there are lil dragons in the gardens and stuff. Magical, whimsical, but also very male, white, cishet. MC is a magician, with a beloved motorcycle.
The motorbike works on a substance called 'lumiere etrange' from a sap of a magical tree. Ecological concerns are more the realm of Solarpunk - loads of e.g.s of this subgenre, which centres eco concerns in the aesthetic.

Sap also produces rubber, though. Pevel plays w/ this.
Meanwhile Nisi Shawl, in EVERFAIR, has a far less romantic view of rubber and the human cost of its production. Workers in Congo who failed to meet their quota had their hands cut off, their wives killed. Acknowledging the price of materials used by Europeans for their tech.
So what are the 'true' difference engines?

Jay Clayton's chapter, 'Hacking the 19thC', the novel ends up affirming the alliance b/w tech & traditional Victorian assumptions about female sexuality, empire & the police that its irreverence about other historical pieties would-
-seem to reject.

Cf. Jemisin, the Haiti-set steampunk book, where evocative phrases are used to highlight corruption and colonialism in terms of smell, sugar coated in blood, etc.
Shawl in Everfair deals with homeland, stolen land, failed political utopia, and colonisation. Failure doesn't mean the journey was for nothing: characters have their individual positive endings and it's a lesbian love story with happy end.
American steampunk is also a way of looking at connections between American and British/European concerns. USA is central for publishing SpecFic, so lots of authors of colour are also American with this particular USA perspective.
Alt Hist = familiarity and difference.

If you are unfamiliar with the history of the setting, then there is more work to be done to ID the point of divergence and the differences.

Not all stories are being told to or for /you/ - author has own audience in mind.
Decolonial steampunk would probably not be classified as steampunk any more?
Cf.
Walter Mignolo, 'The geopolitics of knowledge & the Colonial Difference'
Anibal Quijano, 'Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality'
Maria Lugones, 'Heterosexualism & the Colonial/Modern Gender System'
Conclusion:

There are so many diff taxonomies where different people adopt and adapt the genre and make it their own, but still v few settings that take it out of US/European context.

Hopepunk is @CarolineDuvezin's favourite though and a good note to end on:
Hopepunk talks about nostalgia, regret, emotions around retrofuturist reimaginings of history. Everfair would qualify as hopepunk, e.g., although the term is coined by non binary white author, so different POV, but can be considered with imperial lens stories too.
“Steampunk dies when one artist finishes with it, and is reborn when someone else takes it up.” (Perschon) It can be reinvented, reshaped and reimagined, #ownvoices, decolonised and postcolonial.

//Fin
Postscript:

If you want to give to someone or check out something else, Caro suggests giving to http://www.ko-fi.com/jaymeegoh  who really helped her with recs and does some great work. Jaymee Goh's website is http://www.silver-goggles.blogspot.com 
You can follow @CMRosens.
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