Their Own Devices: Steampunk Airships as Heterotopias of Crisis and Deviance

Courtney Krentz,Mike Perschon,Amy St Amand

doi:10.3390/h11010014

Courtney Krentz, Mike Perschon + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010014

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Abstract

Michel Foucault uses a sailing vessel as the exemplar of his theory of heterotopia because of its mobility. The lateral and vertical mobility of the steampunk airship indicates the potential for an even greater exemplar of heterotopia, particularly of Foucault’s defining principles of heterotopic crisis and deviance. These principles are explored onboard the steampunk airships of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy and Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, resulting in travel towards progressive social frontiers of gender and race. The protagonists of the Leviathan trilogy move from a position of crisis to deviance, as mediated through the friendship and romance of two representatives of warring factions. In contrast, the heroine of the Finishing School series moves from deviance to crisis as she navigates the vagaries of gender and racial identity. These airship heterotopias of young adult fiction, which not only descend geographically but also socially, cross liminal crisis spaces of class, race, gender, and identity to craft literary cartographies for these social frontiers, providing readers with literary maps for their uncertain real worlds of crisis.

Highlights

At the end of ‘Different Spaces’ (1998), Michel Foucault (Foucault 1998, p. 185) uses a sailing vessel as the perfect example of his theory of heterotopia and its defining principles or features, asserting that “the ship [...] lives by its own devices”
Steampunk utilizes time periods when these social frontiers had yet to be as fully explored as they are today; for example, Sophronia and company explore gender and race in ways which arguably are normative today but are transgressive or deviant in Carriger’s fantastic Victorian era. Both the Leviathan and Finishing School series feature several such transgressive behaviours: females cross-dressing as males, relationships between widely disparate social classes, acceptance and normalization of marginal or foreign cultures, and the refusal to toe the line of nationalism—all done while falling in love and ending or preempting wars
Unlike the Leviathan series, the Finishing School series begins as a heterotopia of deviance and transforms into a crisis heterotopia by its end

Summary

Introduction

At the end of ‘Different Spaces’ (1998), Michel Foucault (Foucault 1998, p. 185) uses a sailing vessel as the perfect example of his theory of heterotopia and its defining principles or features, asserting that “the ship [...] lives by its own devices”. Steampunk utilizes time periods when these social frontiers had yet to be as fully explored as they are today; for example, Sophronia and company explore gender and race in ways which arguably are normative today but are transgressive or deviant in Carriger’s fantastic Victorian era. Both the Leviathan and Finishing School series feature several such transgressive behaviours: females cross-dressing as males, relationships between widely disparate social classes, acceptance and normalization of marginal or foreign cultures, and the refusal to toe the line of nationalism—all done while falling in love and ending or preempting wars. When Steffen Hantke declared that “the shaping force behind steampunk is not history but the will of its author to establish and violate and modify a set of ontological ground rules” (Hantke 1999, p. 248), he wrote an insightful observation about steampunk, but a prescient one, anticipating where steampunk would continue to go, not as historical fiction per se, but as speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and horror, all mixed into one—that uses history as its playground, not classroom

Westerfeld’s Leviathan Series—From Crisis to Deviance

Carriger’s Finishing School Series

Conclusions