Steampunk as Resistance

With its focus on Do-It-Yourself innovation, and its origins in Cyberpunk recalcitrance against technology and specialization, Steampunk’s non-luddite rewrite of history, which creates a paradox between 19^th century and present day anxieties, seems to afford girls an opportunity to produce and to change the scope of gender within the culture industry. Unknown and previously un-published authors contribute much to Steampunk fanzines and magazines. In this way, I see Steampunk-Zines and magazines as outlets that allow girls to be producers, producing literature that is a re-write of normative traditions of girl behavior. In addition, many Steampunk communities foster innovation, creativity, and engineering of crafts and products, hosted in conventions. My research in this project seeks to answer how Steampunk works as counterculture. How does its resistance to reductive characterization and labeling create an affinity with women and girls that questions gender stereotyping in society? How can Steampunk work in a variety of media to resist the reproduction of gender structures and gender commoditization by choosing either to highlight, ignore, or re-create certain aspects of Victorian and 19^th century culture? In overlapping histories, communities, and categories, I hope to illustrate how Steampunk can rewrite a past of PinkThink normativity while promoting change in feminine commoditization and consumerism.