Clockwork Corsets : Pressed Against the Past

For a feminist scholar of technology, contemporary steampunk cultures incorporate several interesting elements. They embrace playful ways of relating to technology. They contain thrifty Do-It-Yourself strategies and ethics of recycling, linking the crafting of sexually specific bodies to imaginative time-play. They involve an intermingling of technological extensions with modes of embodiment and costuming. The corset is an emblematic Victorian, industrial technology in steampunk costuming, altering bodies and affects as well as aesthetics and politics. But how far can white, Victorian, middle-class, imperialist, corseted femininity be ‘punked’, twisted, modified, or transformed? And how much do these transpositions in and through time get caught up in a machinery of repetition rather than revision? Or are there ways of thinking the old and the new differently altogether