Victorian Invention, The Locomotive (23/30)

The third of Oda's Victorian Invention compositions recorded here — the locomotive, that quintessential emblem of nineteenth-century technological transformation, which remade the landscape, compressed time and distance, and became a symbol of industrial capitalism's power over nature and human communities. Oda's goddess figure at the controls of a locomotive reclaims this instrument of industrial power for the feminine: the steam engine's fire and water, its combination of explosive energy with mechanical precision, its capacity to move through the world with unstoppable force — all these qualities, usually cast in masculine terms, become in Oda's hands expressions of the divine feminine's own irresistible power.