Re-assembling the Victorians: Steampunk, Cyborgs, and the Ethics of Industry

• Main Author: Helena Esser
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2018-06-01
• Series: Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
• Subjects: steampunk; cyborg; neo-Victorianism; technophilia; retrofuturism; machines
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cve/3480
• ISSN: 0220-5610; 2271-6149

If Victorian discourse established a binary opposition between the organic and the mechanic in order to negotiate human identity in the rapidly transforming age of Industrialisation, steampunk re-envisions and re-assembles this binary in order to challenge its validity in the digital age. As a popular aesthetic that re-envisions the nineteenth century through the lenses of Neo-Victorianism, technofantasy and retrofuturism, steampunk may be applied to various media. It has generated an active subculture whose participants utilise a perceived Victorian technophilia to fuel their own anachronistic explorations. Its counter-cultural core philosophy is built around a yearning for re-humanised technology that promises accessibility, vulnerability and individuation, following the credo ‘Love the machine, hate the factory’. While its machines, hailed as ‘real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world’, become humanised, humans may in turn become mechanised or fused with technology as steam-cyborgs. Whether these encode ethical trespass or promise to remedy physical trauma, the ambiguous figure of the steam-cyborg may employ Victorian hopes and anxieties in order to reflect back our own concerns about human identity in the age of digital technology and fabricate more flexible alternatives. In my paper, I offer an analysis of the steampunk cyborg in literature, film and cosplay as a cultural metaphor, using post-human theory and steampunk’s own manifestos in order to examine how the cyborg re-negotiates industry, identity and agency via the neo-Victorian design aesthetic.