Professor Jenny Sundén
Institutionen för kultur och lärande
Södertörns högskola

Clockwork, Corsets, and Brass: Politics and Dreams in Steampunk Cultures 2011-2015

The project Clockwork, Corsets, and Brass: Politics and Dreams in Steampunk Cultures has worked, continuously, with the purpose of critically investigating the political and theoretical implications of contemporary steampunk cultures, and in particular focus on their ways of re-imagining the relationships between technology, materiality, and embodiment. the project combines feminist theory, media and technology studies and ethnography to study the transnational steampunk scene (Sweden is the point of departure), online as well as offline. Here are the three most important results of the project:

THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT: AFFECT THEORY IN NEW WAYS
The research project has come to invest in an ongoing intellectual debate at the verge of the humanities and the social sciences, namely affect theory. Several publications of the project spin around steampunk as an interesting contemporary affective investment in the mechanical and the analog (Sundén 2012; 2013; 2015a). Affect theory is often figured in close conjunction with digital media. In the article Corporeal Anachronisms (Sundén 2013), my attempt is instead to think affect, with Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, through the mechanical. More specifically, this is done through the most emblematic mechanical-industrial bodily technology in steampunk: the corset. The article has two main purposes: It complicates the idea of the corset as either oppressive or liberating by partly moving beyond the level of cultural meaning, and instead focus on the corset as affective machinery. To think with Spinoza, here, becomes a matter of understanding the corset as a corporeal technology, which in terms of power and capacity simultaneously restricts and expands the body. Secondly, the text also performs (with the feminist philosopher Moira Gaitens) a micro-political feminist reading of inter-corporeality, of affective relations between biological and mechanical bodies. To this effect, affect theory is per definition a posthumanist theory and critique.

CONCEPTUAL INNOVATION: THE TRANSDIGITAL
In Technologies of Feeling: Affect Between the Analog and the Digital (Sundén 2015a), the discussion of the affective dimensions of steampunk is advanced by a focus on how a movement deeply in love with the analog at the same time is highly digitally connected. In the midst of digital networks and cultures, built on endless technological upgrades and speed, a different culture is taking shape. One that contrasts speed with slowness, displaces the new with the old and the used, and replaces supposedly immaterial streams of data with highly material, tactile technologies, materials, and fabrics. Rather than understanding this as a romantic longing for the past, what Laura Marks terms analog nostalgia, I show how the steampunk love affair with the analog is completely dependent on digital technologies, imaging, and circulations. Nikolas Negroponte speaks of our present moment as postdigital, characterized by ubiquitous computing and the invisible presence of digital technologies. My understanding is rather the opposite. We live, indeed, in the aftermath of the digital revolution. But what analog movements (like steampunk) clarify, is how technologies are always strikingly material, embodied, and situated. Therefore, I have coined the term transdigital to account for the tendency in contemporary media landscapes to constantly shuttle between the analog and the digital, the street and the web, the materially specific and the seemingly immaterial and invisible. What a conceptualization of the transdigital brings to the fore is a heightened attention to the local, embodied, affective nature of contemporary technological practices.

METHODOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT: TACTILE TEMPORALITY AND A HAPTIC METHOD
In Steampunk Practices: Time, Tactility, and a Racial Politics of Touch (Sundén 2014a, see also Sundén 2014b), I focus on how steampunk offers a highly tactile relation with an imaginary past. In my understanding, such tactile temporality also demands a tactile, or haptic method. By focusing on modalities of touch in steampunk practices, as well as in research methods, I contribute to discussions of the senses and of sensation in general, and of touch in particular. There is a tendency in cultural theory to think sensation (or affect, for that matter) as something universal and autonomous in ways that short-circuit questions of criticality and politics. Instead, I side with feminist thinkers who argue that there are certainly politics in how things feel. The method of touch that I outline explores the affective and temporal dimensions of closeness to materials, fabrics, and images. At the same time, it is a method that investigates the political and ethical implications of such closeness, bringing into the discussion the politics of sensation. What does it mean to touch, to feel, to wear the history of white, bourgeois, Victorian imperialism? For whom is this a pleasurable experience? And how does it feel to be out of sync with such history in terms of race, or sexuality? As such, it is a method that does not primarily shuttle between closeness and distance (as is often the case with methods), but which rather shows how closeness itself may hold distance through bodily difference and differentiation.

TRANSGENDER STUDIES: NEW QUESTIONS, NEW PERSPECTIVES
The project has also contributed to an emerging field of transgender studies (Sundén 2015b; 2015c). This is an important result, and at the same time an intriguing opening toward new questions, projects, and discussions. Against the backdrop of the public gender transition of the steampunk robot musician Isabella Bunny Bennett (a process in intimate correspondence with her fans in social media), questions of technological embodiment, gender politics, temporality, and steampunk took center stage. Departing from this case, I have (among other things) analyzed and theorized what could be called trans- temporality. Within queer theory, the discussion of queer temporality and ways of critiquing what Elizabeth Freeman calls chrononormativity has been intense. What would happen, I wonder, if we were to shift the focus to gender, and instead think gender as a complex, layered temporal form? (Sundén 2015b; 2015d). I have also used this case study as a springboard for developing new gender theory. (Sundén 2015c; forthcoming 2016). What my steampunk project, most concretely, has given me for future work is a foundation for thinking gender as something fundamentally technological, and as such broken The heavy, oily, imperfect, struggling machines of steampunk help pinpoint how technologies are always incomplete and vulnerable. Within a technological feminist framework, gender can be understood as a broken, vulnerable machinery, a way of thinking which in turn can contribute to feminist theory, digital media studies, and posthumanist critique.

IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS
It is difficult to pick the two most important publications. In terms of academic weight, I would go with Corporeal Anachronisms (currently the third most downloaded article at the journal Somatechnics, Edinburgh University Press), and Temporalities of Transition (more recently published, but already with significant academic response). If I, instead, would chose two publications with broader distribution, it would be On Trans-, Glitch, and Gender as Machinery of Failure (in First Monday, a large open access peer review journal) and Technologies of Feeling: Affect Between the Analog and the Digital (because of the publishing muscle of the MIT Press).

INTERNATIONAL ANCHORING
The project is international to the bone. I have received continuous invitations to present at international conferences. I have made numerous field trips to major steampunk events in the UK (The Asylum) and the US (Steampunk World's Fair, Steamcon). The movement I study is fundamentally international. Most of my publications are international. The project has also generated international research collaborations through a network of researchers around the concept somatechnics (Susan Stryker, Nikki Sullivan, Goldie Osuri, Margrit Shildrick, and others). This collaboration manifested itself in an international symposium at Södertörn University, April 12-14, 2012 (Somatechnical Figurations: Kinship, Bodies, Affects), which I co-organized with Ulrika Dahl, as well as resulted in an invite to act as guest editors for an issue of the journal Somatechnics (Dahl & Sundén 2013).

RESEARCH INFORMATION AND COMMUNITY OUTREACH
In terms of research information beyond the scholarly community, I have been an invited speaker to two Swedish steampunk events: Steampunkkonvent i Alingsås, Okctober 11-13, 2013, and at Swecon Steampunk festival, June 27-29, 2014, in Gävle. I have also been interviewed for ETC Göteborg (the article Ångande intresse för dåtidens framtid, October 11, 2013), and for Hela Hälsingland (the article Drömmen om en framtid som aldrig kom, March 15, 2014). I have also figured in the media around questions concerning feminism, technology, and digital media: On national public radio: P1, Studio Ett, October 14, 2013, as well as in a six-page article in the leftist weekend magazine ETC (the article System Break Down, June 14, 2014). In correspondence with my article Temporalities of Transition, I also wrote a blog post with broader appeal for the Edinburgh University Press blog.

PUBLICATION STRATEGY
One publication strategy has been to publish in peer review journals that only publish open access (Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; First Monday; Lambda Nordica). For the two articles to the journal Somatechnics, I have bought the rights to open access. Sundén 2012 is freely available online in DiVA, as is a pre-publication version of the article for European Journal of Cultural Studies. Finally, for the chapter to the MIT Press anthology (Sundén 2015a), I will be able to publish a pdf in DiVA of this chapter in 2016.

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
1. Sundén, Jenny (2012) Ångpunkens politik. In Bjurström, Fredriksson, Olsson & Werner (eds.) Senmoderna reflexioner: Festskrift till Johan Fornäs. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press. Available online: http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:496579. (December 2, 2015).

2. Sundén, Jenny (2013) Corporeal Anachronisms: Notes on Affect, Relationality, and Power in Steampunk. Somatechnics 3(2): 369-386. Available online: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/soma.2013.0103. (December 2, 2015).

3. Sundén, Jenny (2014a) Steampunk Practices: Time, Tactility, and a Racial Politics of Touch. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology 5. Available online: http://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-sunden/. (December 2, 2015).

4. Sundén, Jenny (2014b) Clockwork Corsets: Pressed Against the Past. International Journal of Cultural Studies. Published online before print: January 16, 2014, doi: 10.1177/1367877913513697. Print version: May 2015, 18(3): 379-383. Available online: http://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:689594/FULLTEXT01.pdf. (December 2, 2015).

5. Sundén, Jenny (2015a) Technologies of Feeling: Affect between the Analog and the Digital. In Hillis, Ken, Susanna Paasonen & Michael Petit (eds.) Networked Affect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

6. Sundén, Jenny (2015b) Temporalities of Transition: Trans- temporal Femininity in a Musical Automaton. Somatechnics 5(2): 197-216. Available online: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/soma.2015.0161. (December 2, 2015).

7. Sundén, Jenny (2015c) On Trans-, Glitch, and Gender as Machinery of Failure. First Monday 20(4), April 2015. Special Issue: Digital Gender: Toward a New Generation of Insights. Available online: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5895/4416. (December 2, 2015).

8. Sundén, Jenny (2015d) Gender as trans-formation. Blog post at Edinburgh University Press Blog. http://euppublishingblog.com/2015/09/22/gender-as-trans-formation/. (December 2, 2015).

9. Sundén, Jenny (forthcoming, 2016) Glitch, genus, tillfälligt avbrott: Femininitet som sårbarhetens teknologi. Lambda Nordica (peer reviewed and accepted for publication).

KEYNOTE CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
Sundén, Jenny (2012) Corporeal Anachronisms. Keynote at the international conference Thought as Action: Gender, Democracy, Freedom, August 16-18, University of Bergen, Norway.

Sundén, Jenny (2013) Participation in keynote roundtable closing discussion (with Monica Casper, Ulrika Dahl, Goldie Osuri and Cecilia Åsberg) at Somatechnics International Conference: Missing Links: The Somatechnics of Decolonization, June 17-19, 2013, Linköping.

Sundén, Jenny (2015) Digital Vulnerability: On Glitch, Materiality, and Gender as Machinery of Failure. Keynote at the yearly national Danish gender studies conference (Foreningen for Kønsforskning i Danmarks årlige kønskonference) Krop(u)mulig – Jubilæumskonference om den medierede krop (Body(Im)Possible – Jubliee Conference on the Mediated Body), April 18, 2015, Odense.

Sundén, Jenny (2015) Glitch, Gender, Breakdown: Trans-Femininity as Vulnerable Technology. Keynote at the Nordic Transgender Studies Symposium, October 29-30, 2015, University of Turku.

INVITED SPEAKER TO CONFERENCES
Sundén, Jenny (2013) Affektiva teknologier i ett transdigitalt medielandskap. Invited speaker to the Scandinavian symposium “Vardagslivets och kulturens medialisering” arranged by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Stockholm, August 26-27, 2013.

Sundén, Jenny (2013) Transhumanism, Transgenderism: Taking the Prefix Trans- Seriously. Invited speaker to the symposium Posthumanism/Transhumanism at Södertörn University, September 13, 2013.

Sundén, Jenny (2014) Transdigital, Transgender. Invited speaker to the conference Digital Gender: Theory, Methodology and Practice at Umeå University, March 12-14, 2014.

Sundén, Jenny (2014) Temporalities of Transition: Trans- temporal Femininity in a Musical Automaton. Invited speaker to The Transgender Studies Workshop at Södertörn University, September 17-18, 2014.

OTHER CONFERENCE PAPER PRESENTATIONS
Sundén, Jenny (2012) Spinoza in a Corset: Notes on Affect, Relationality, and Power in Steampunk. Paper presented at 8th European Feminist Research Conference, May 17-20, 2012, Budapest.

Sundén, Jenny (2012) Passionate Technologies. Paper presented at Crossroads in Cultural Studies, July 2-6, 2012, Paris.

Sundén, Jenny (2013) Neo-Victorian Somatechnics: Time, Femininity, and Race Out of Joint. Paper presented at Somatechnics International Conference: Missing Links: The Somatechnics of Decolonization, June 17-19, 2013, Linköping.

Sundén, Jenny (2013) Technologies of Feeling: Affect between the Analog and the Digital. Paper presented at IR14 (AoIR), October 23-26 2013, Denver, Colorado.

Sundén, Jenny (2014) Trans, Femininity, and Digital Intimacy. Paper presented at IR15 (AoIR), October 22-24 2014, Daegu, South Korea.

Sundén, Jenny (2015) Glitch Feminism. Paper presented at Sex and Capital: 9th European Feminist Research Conference, June 3-6 2015, Rovaniemi, Finland.

Sundén, Jenny (2015) Glitch Affect. Paper presented at the Affect Theory Conference, October 14-17 2015, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.