There really are times

[branchandroot]

Normally, you know, I scoff at the people who respond to any variation of "you depicted people who are like me as $DISGUSTINGLY_BIGOTED_STEREOTYPE in your fic, could you not do that?" with cries of "What do you mean I can't write about this?!". Because, of course, that isn't what any sane person involved actually said, and pretending they did is a transparent buck-passing attempt for which I have only scoffing.

I do also realize that there are people who really do try to tell people they can't write about X topic or group, but, honestly, I can't consider those people with anything but scoffing either.

However.

I hereby declare that no Western steampunk fan is ever, ever again allowed to use the word "geisha" without first undergoing, and prominently displaying proof of, at least one full term of Japanese women's studies or the equivalent.


This post brought to you by a serious case of "omg, how are you related to me, can I disown you right now please" (national and fandom varieties).

Comments

[helens78]

There are not enough hearts for you for this post. Not enough hearts!

[branchandroot]

Oh my god, I am just clawing my eyes out over here. And the people who, even after being nicely corrected twice about how that isn't a geisha outfit at all, it's just a remixed kimono, and a steampunk geisha could be really cool but that seriously isn't it, and do they really just want advice on how to remix kimono in general... after all that still say "oh, I just want a geisha-inspired outfit"! Ahhhhhh! *stabs with a wolverine*

[annotated_em]

Hah! Yes, this.

[branchandroot]

Seriously. *shakes head* I know the manufacturers and purveyors of orientalist kitsch are far from blameless in this, but that's no excuse for swallowing their marketing whole!

[legionseagle]

I loathe and despise steampunk in its entirety whether it uses the term "gesiha" or not, but in your spirit of education of the Western steam-punk fan, may I ask that after the full term of Japanese women's studies or equivalent they then act as the fireman on the footplate of the Flying Scotsman during the entire run from London to Edinburgh*. After which, since they will by then realise the sheer effort in human labour which kept the steam age going, they may go back to believing that magically the working class all know their place in steampunk and that "there is no punk in steampunk".

OTOH, I found out the other day that a client of mine is working on a modern-day airship. I cantered around the department carolling, "How cool is that?"

* In a kimono, should they so wish.

[branchandroot]

"there is no punk in steampunk"

*blinks* Who on earth have you been talking to? I'm thankful to say that, despite some other egregious lacks of clue, I have not run into such an assertion yet.

[legionseagle]

It's a reference to this which, while on the face of it asserts, "There is totally punk in steampunk" actually then goes on to be gratuitously nasty about punk and what punk as a movement stood for. I believe I may have posted about it also.

[branchandroot]

...

This is an eta to the comment above, which did not fit in before the reply. It seems to apply here, also.

While I can quite agree with loathing blatant classism and nasty stereotyping, I really have to say, strolling into someone's comments and starting out by telling her that you loathe and despise her developing new fandom in its entirety is really uncool. I'm happy to discuss particular things within the fandom that may well be loathsome, but only if you can manage specifics instead of the kind of hyperbole that insults me inclusively, especially after you have presumably already seen my attempts to address some of those specifics.

That post engages in thoughtless and, on the face of it, classist stereotyping about the punk movement, yes. That is wrong and worth calling out. But it also makes some thoughtful and useful answers to the anti-political faction within steampunk, which is a darn good thing to be doing. The second does not excuse the first, but neither should the first be a reason to ignore the second and declare the whole project despicable.

Short form: If you genuinely are trying to insult me, please take a hike. If you aren't, please be more specific in your denunciations.

[legionseagle]

I apologise for having upset you. From what I have seen of your posts and actions I think you are someone with whom I generally have a great deal in common. That may not include steampunk; certainly, as I see steampunk at present this does not include steampunk.


I do not necessarily think that a complete divide on the topic of steampunk (if this is what results after my explanation given below) should prevent us talking about other areas while avoiding that one. Like RPF (and I have good online friends with whom I have to agree to disagree about RPF, at least with regard to living people) I do have enormous problems with the whole steampunk project. My problems with it are as follows (please feel free to counter them from a position of knowledge of steampunk itself; I agree that my profound upset with the way steampunk gets raised from time to time may make me less than well-informed about how it works in practice);

1. Blatant classism. Raising steam depends on being at the top of a pyramid which starts with coal. If you've not read Orwell's essay Down the Mine about the physical toil taken on coal miners and the way their lives were threatened by both the coal dust on their lungs and the unrelenting physical toil of mining, please could you do so? It should be available on-line. After the coal has been mined, hauled, washed, it is then sent to the steam-boiler to be shoveled by the fireman. I do not get any sense that the "black gangs" (the stokers who worked in intolerable conditions in the bowels of ships like Titanic) are recognised as human or as even existing in steampunk.

My problem with steampunk is that the versions I've seen have had the Professor and his team say, "make it so" to get where they want ot go and no-one gives a damn for the people who are spewing up their guts to do so.

2. Colonialism. Coaling stations. If you look at the British Empire and how it retreated after WWII, you'll note the odd few little dots across the Atlantic ocean which were the last places we hung onto. Those are coaling stations. Wars were fought over little dots on that map, that would be suitable coaling stations, because steam ships have only a limited cruising range. Indigenous peoples were exterminated to place coaling stations. If you subscribe to a steam-punk, air-ship aesthetic, where are the coaling stations and how do you handle that in your new myhtology.

3. Ecology. Steam creates acid rain and particulate emissions. The glorious buildings of Europe only became glorious after the imposition of smoke-free zones and scrubbing (at great expense). The return of steam signals the destruction of both forests and the Parthenon. Again, fine if the genre handles it, but does it.

4. Wilful anachronism, erasing the true nature of the struggle for women's rights. This is a specific and narrow-based annoyance, rather than the large scope of the comments above, but in the same series of tor.com posts which produced the one I quoted, someone talked about a strip called "the adventures of Babbage and Lovelace" in which they put Ada, Countess of Lovelace into jodhpurs because they didn't like the idea of someone like her being constrained by the dress conventions of the day. That idea made me want to vomit. The whole point, to anyone who has studied the life of Ada, Countess of Lovelace was that she went mad (for some definitions of the word mad) and was rendered incredibly unhappy because of the constraints placed on her by precisely the societal standards (symbolised by her dress) which little miss sparklypants decided to remove for the cartoon.

To sum up, I don't despise or wish to insult anyone for taking a different view of steampunk to mine, and I am open to attempts to convince me I am wrong about the genre, or (more probably) that there are examples of the genre which redeem it. But from what I have seen of it, I really, really have problems with it. Sorry.

[branchandroot]

Thank you. It's possible that we will eventually just have to agree not to discuss steampunk, which I'm willing to do, because I do quite enjoy reading you on other topics.

I agree that your objections are well-raised, too. The manifestations of steampunk that specifically call on steam while ignoring the implications of coal make me very uncomfortable, not least because one side of my family came from mining and there are family stories about the human cost. My own project solution to this is to assume that, yes, there is a period where coal is one primary energy source, and it has all its historical gruesomeness. But it doesn't last quite as long, and the global economy makes available a number of alternatives, such as hydro power and oil; none of these are without their own cost, to be sure, and I expect environmental degradation to be a higher profile issue sooner in this universe because of increased communication over such impact. And then, of course, there's the places where propulsion really is by magic.

Of course, I'm also tweaking things to let more of the 1848 revolutions succeed. This is an exercise in optimism, among other things. I'm trying to make it an exercise in conscious re-writing, though, rather than either myopic re-enactment or ignorant erasure.

You're right that there are significant portions, possibly even the majority, of steampunk fans who don't want to consider this, who want to treat steam as handwavium rather than as steam, who don't know or don't care about the history they're implicitly erasing. But there are also people, and I like to think I'm one of them, who are pulling in a different direction, trying to address and wrestle with the scary parts. There also seem to be those who leave off steam and go with wind-power or positrons or straight-up handwavium, all in a brass case (like the Foglios), or who want to talk about what might happen when gears and macro mechanics exist side by side with fission (okay, that's me again). And we are just as steampunk as anyone else.

If you don't want to wade through the former to find the latter, I don't blame you! And if you just plain don't like the historical revision at the heart of pretty much any steampunk project, whether clueless or not, that's fine too. If this is a topic we can't see eye to eye on, well, that happens sometimes. What I'm trying to do is come up with a plausible way for all this technology to happen earlier and more mixed up, and to take advantage of the social upsets that implies for every purpose from anti-colonialism to fashion remixes that maybe make people think; and that's steampunk too. If that still punches your buttons, well... hopefully we can agree to disagree.

[legionseagle]

Actually, I can see a lot of good in what you're trying to do, and I'm also trying to write an AU fantasy version of The Riddle of the Sands that if any publisher wants to put it in a genre, the genre will be steampunk (the irony!). But the tor.com month of steam-punk wound me up so badly, because no-one was standing there and saying "steam is evil power" in the way (can't you tell?) that me, raised by CND activists, can't read later Weber where suddenly Grayson nuclear fission has saved the asses of Manticore and huh! all that superstitious fear of nuclear turns out to be old-fashioned bollocks.

I think I'm still trying to work out if steampunk is a left-wing or a right wing genre, and I think it's mostly the latter/

[branchandroot]

*wry* I hear you about Weber and fission, and a lot of the military sub-genre are worse than him. *shudders* I'm afraid most of even the more aware fans within steampunk haven't gotten that far yet. Hell, there's only one other site I've found that's even extending the basic concepts beyond Europe. I think the step to "steam kills" is lagging even further because it isn't as immediately in front of most people's noses as the colonialism thing.

*thoughtful* It's an interesting question, actually. There are examples of both right and left aligned work, sometimes quite extreme ones (Moorcock, frex). I think there's also a disconnect between the "real life" of a lot of fans and the "dress up" parts. You run into a lot of that in the SCA too; there are no peasants, everyone is at least gentry, and one major thread of it is all about reifying "the biggest thug gets to rule", but no one would dream of or stand for applying that to their mundane lives. Of course, another major thread is absolute meritocracy, and the actual governance skews toward the latter, so it's... complicated. I doubt steampunk will quite get there, more's the pity, but I do take some small comfort in the fact that the actual artists, the creative powerhouses, tend to be more with the toolboxes and welding rigs than the top hats.

I'm really hoping that, if the artistic movement is around for long enough, it will evolve a political soul. Right now, if there is one, I think it's in its infancy.

[legionseagle]

I get the impression that thanks to people like Jaymee Goh there are people looking at some aspects of the colonial thing (though they aren't looking at coaling stations which, for me, are absolutely integral to the whole structure) and that's good, don't get me wrong, but the class problems of "steam kills" threatens to topple the whole edifice so that people like me saying "steam kills in general - how does your steam not kill in particular?" is something people are so hostile to that it's very rare to have someone like you prepared to even talk about it.

[branchandroot]

I believe it. Kind of the way a really freaking annoying subset of anime/manga fans react when I or anyone else point out the embedded misogyny. They don't want to think about that! This is just for fun! And anyway, it can't be real/that bad/right to point out for X spurious reason! *snorts* No. The cost is always there, and pretending it isn't is inexcusable.

[legionseagle]

Yes. So while I'm prepared to believe that I'm being inconsistent, compared to people I do read (Kipling!) I do have problems with steampunk that go beyond the obvious, and I get the impression that a lot of the writers in the sector haven't given any thought to the cost.

Thank you for being so understanding. I didn't set out to harsh your squee, just to mark where I stood in this regard. And while I know people are tackling the colonialism (though not many of them) I find the embedded classism just a bridge too far - surely someone should by now have spotted there's an issue, why am I the only person talking about it, oh look, there's this carpet and this brush and the darkness falls as usual.

[staranise]

How... interesting that a general outfit which was worn by a huge number of women from this foreign culture is mostly called, by Westerners, after the most exoticized and sexualized out of all of them.

[branchandroot]

And it's not even a women's garment! It's utterly unisex! There's some unpleasant history behind the foreign use of the term "geisha", and that history is still being perpetuated abroad in only slightly less blatant ways today. But anyone doing historically adaptive costuming should at least take a passing look at the history in question, which would tell them that's not the right word!

[opusculus]

There is never enough facepalm when people start talking about geishas.

[branchandroot]

There isn't. We will need to fly in emergency supplies of facepalm. Seriously.

[aldanise]

The Master of my dorm specifically referred to my Halloween costume my freshman year as a "geisha" costume, when everything outside the yukata itself was deliberately designed to emphasize the "spends way too much time hiking through brush" aspect of the character I was actually dressed up as. I got a lot more wary of Japanese traditional clothing costume bases after that.

[branchandroot]

*headdesk* After that, I am not surprised!