Corporeal Anachronisms: Notes on Affect, Relationality, and Power in Steampunk

Steampunk is an aesthetic technological movement incorporating science fiction, art, engineering, and a vibrant 21st century Do-It-Yourself counterculture. This article explores the feminist potentials of ‘thinking with’ steampunk as a playful, affective and decidedly political response to the present technological condition. It starts out by navigating the field of affect theory with a Deleuzian reading of Baruch Spinoza on affect, to then engage in the affective renderings of the relations, rhythms, and power of a soma-technology central to steampunks as well as their Victorian predecessors: the corset. The purpose of the article is (at least) threefold: first, it sets out to complicate the notion of the corset as either oppressive or liberating by a move from signification to affect. Secondly, it aims to put a feminist spin on Spinoza, by offering what Moira Gatens (2000) calls a micropolitical feminism of the in-betweens of subjects (or bodies). The argument, thus, takes seriously the seeming lack of distinction in Spinoza between nature and artifice, which opens up possibilities of exploring the affective relations and the in-betweens of human and nonhuman bodies. Finally, and as a result of this interest in the affective relationality of human and nonhuman bodies, the article contributes to the discussion of ‘somatechnics’ ( Sullivan and Murray 2009 ) by proposing an intimate relationship between somatechnics and affect.