Our Lady of the Upside Down

codalion: alierakieron: anachronistique: Tor.com » Bartitsu: More Fashionable...

codalion:

tinyfist:

codalion:

wildunicornherd:

alierakieron:

anachronistique:

Tor.com » Bartitsu: More Fashionable than Fisticuffs

wildunicornherd:

Ay-leen the Peacemaker reports back from a seminar on bartitsu, an obscure Victorian English form of martial arts that combined various fighting styles from boxing to jujitsu,…

“#wishful thinking can make anything faintly historical grounds for a steampunk trend”

That’s the spirit!

If you’re steampunk and you know it, clap your hands! [awkward silence]
If you’re steampunk and you know it, clap your hands! [awkward silence]
If you’re steampunk and you know it, and your belief cogs and gears belong somewhere that isn’t the inside of a clock and your flimsy understanding of imperialism and postcolonial history really really show it, then you’re steampunk and you know it, clap your hands! [awkward silence]

I don’t think this version scans. :( 

it doesn’t have to scan ‘cause it’s steampunk and that’s a better freer-floating signifier than any old meter!

ugh ugh ugh. one thing (among everything) that really gets me about this bullshit? once again, only the moneyed classes exist in the past (“every gentleman had a watch, every lady a parasol”: I guess the poor just used boring old fists, little dreaming how that would exile them from the cool mode of historical fantasizing)

What, you don’t like fantasizing about what your life would be like in a bowdlerized version of the 1800s?  Answers “picking oakum” and “in a sanatorium until inevitable suicide or disease brought on by pestilent conditions” are right out, I thought of those but then remembered that never seems to happen in steampunk.

But yes, +1 on all of that.  Actually, Regency fans are the worst offenders when it comes to erasing poor people — I think Charles Dickens succeeded at least in embedding the existence of poor people in the Anglophone consciousness regarding the 1850s onward, but thanks to everyone’s favorite queen of overrated English romantic comedy, many fiction readers believe that dirt came into existence in London when Queen Victoria took the throne.  I think in general, rather like modern poor people, historical poor people in fiction get treated as wretched and gritty settings for glamourized historical rich people to have adventures.  I mean, how often is it treated as a sign of virility for a historical playboy to patronize sex slaves, uh, I mean slum prostitutes?  (Never mind the whole notion of a rich playboy going to a slum brothel in the first place, but I think most of the people who write these things wouldn’t know a playboy from a PlayStation any more than they would a slum from a Slim Jim.)

Really, what this often boils down to is a nostalgia for an imaginary time when men were gentlemen, women were ladies, and undesirables were offscreen.

Often, yes, but not always.

And this is why I’m troubled by the critique of aspects of Steampunk turns into a critique of Steampunk itself. For one, there IS good stuff being written out there that does, in fact, engage these issues and does it well. There is Steampunk being written by people of color that plays with the genre in really exciting ways. And I think it is possible to like an aesthetic without buying into nostalgia whole-heartedly.

I like upper-class Victorian clothing because it is gorgeous, gorgeous stuff, but I’m not in the least blind to the issues associated with it, and I think it’s possible to engage with an aesthetic and not buy into the revisionism. 

ON ANOTHER NOTE: It’s particualrly ironic that Regency fiction is so, so bad at this issue, since it’s all inspired by a love of All things Austen. Austen, on the other hand, was in fact dealing (in her own way, mind. I won’t say she’s without her own problems) with those issues in her work. It’s not explicit, but the anxiety that a stratified society raises and the very high possibility of a fall into very real and devastating poverty are the bedrock every word is based on.

(via ourlightsinvain)