Heavy Metal Gender And Sexuality

Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality brings together a collection of original, interdisciplinary, critical essays exploring the negotiated place of gender and sexuality in heavy metal music and its culture. Scholars debate the current state of play concerning masculinities, femininities, queerness, identity aesthetics and monstrosities in an area of music that is sometimes mistakenly treated as exclusively sustaining a masculinist hegemony. The book combines a broad variety of perspectives on the main topic, regarding gender in connection to: the history of the genre; the range of metal subgenres; heavy metal's multidimensional scope (music, lyrics, performance, style, illustrations); men and women; sexualities and various local and global perspectives. Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality is a text that opens up the world of heavy metal to reveal that it is a very diverse and ground-breaking stage where gender play is at the centre of its theatricality and sustains its mass appeal.

This book provides a sociological examination of gender issues concerning the status of women in the subculture of heavy metal. The study specifically analyzes how women are perceived to ‘do gender’ in the heavy metal community, which is known for its hypermasculine qualities. Relying on interviews with fans of heavy metal, the respondents describe their own music (sub)culture as having been dominated by men, but they also note distinct signs of the progress women have made in the heavy metal culture on terms aspiring to equality with men. Despite these changes, gendered conditions driven by masculinity continue to exist for women in heavy metal. Even as women are slowly finding their way to develop what might one day become, but as of now not yet is, a realized identity and culture of heavy metal feminism, patterns of masculinity continue to hamper gender equity in this area of popular culture.

While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance, pervasiveness, and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos. Heavy metal scholarship has until recently focused almost solely on the roles of heterosexual hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity in fans and performers. The dependence on that narrow dichotomy has limited heavy metal scholarship, resulting in poorly critiqued discussions of gender and sexuality that serve only to underpin the popular imagining of heavy metal as violent, homophobic and inherently masculine. This book queers heavy metal studies, bringing discussions of gender and sexuality in heavy metal out of that poorly theorized dichotomy. In this interdisciplinary work, the author connects new and existing scholarship with a strong ethnographic study of heavy metal’s self-identified queer performers and fans in their own words, thus giving them a voice and offering an original and ground-breaking addition to scholarship on popular music, rock, and queer studies.

This book is a timely examination of the tension between being a rock music fan and being a woman. From the media representation of women rock fans as groupies to the widely held belief that hard rock and metal is masculine music, being a music fan is an experience shaped by gender. Through a lively discussion of the idealised imaginary community created in the media and interviews with women fans in the UK, Rosemary Lucy Hill grapples with the controversial topics of groupies, sexism and male dominance in metal. She challenges the claim that the genre is inherently masculine, arguing that musical pleasure is much more sophisticated than simplistic enjoyments of aggression, violence and virtuosity. Listening to women’s experiences, she maintains, enables new thinking about hard rock and metal music, and about what it is like to be a women fan in a sexist environment.

This book originates from the 2017 edition of the multidisciplinary Modern Heavy Metal Conference, organised in Helsinki, Finland. This collection of seven scholarly essays explores local scenes and identities within heavy metal music from multiple angles, covering a variety of different countries and metal sub-genres from Finland to Indonesia, and from black metal to metalcore. The essays here lay various theoretical perspectives and incorporate vivid examples with metal bands and scenes from all over the world. By exploring themes and discourses that are central to both research and practice, this book appeals to a versatile global readership. It serves the wide academic communities of metal music and popular music studies as well as of many other streams within cultural and social studies. This book also provides the large and active global community of heavy metal fans with a highly interesting package of genre information and country perspectives.

The chapters collected in this volume shed light on the areas of interaction between film studies and heavy metal research, exploring how the audio-visual medium of film relates to, builds on and shapes metal culture. At one end of the spectrum, metal music serves as a form of ambient background in horror films that creates an intense and somewhat threatening atmosphere; at the other end, the high level of performativity attached to the metal spectacle is emphasized. Alongside these tendencies, the recent and ongoing wave of metal documentaries has taken off, relying on either satire or hagiography.

This book demonstrates the rich and varied ways in which heavy metal music draws on the ancient Greek and Roman world. Contributors examine bands from across the globe, including: Blind Guardian (Germany), Therion (Sweden), Celtic Frost, Eluveitie (Switzerland), Ex Deo (Canada/Italy), Heimdall, Stormlord, Ade (Italy), Kawir (Greece), Theatre of Tragedy (Norway), Iron Maiden, Bal-Sagoth (UK), and Nile (US). These and other bands are shown to draw inspiration from Classical literature and mythology such as the Homeric Hymns, Vergil's Aeneid, and Caesar's Gallic Wars, historical figures from Rome and ancient Egypt, and even pagan and occult aspects of antiquity. These bands' engagements with Classical antiquity also speak to contemporary issues of nationalism, identity, sexuality, gender, and globalization. The contributors show how the genre of heavy metal brings its own perspectives to Classical reception, and demonstrate that this music-often dismissed as lowbrow-engages in sophisticated dialogue with ancient texts, myths, and historical figures. The authors reveal aspects of Classics' continued appeal while also arguing that the engagement with myth and history is a defining characteristic of heavy metal music, especially in countries that were once part of the Roman Empire.

In metal, it seems that women are nowhere but gender is everywhere. This title offers a sociological analysis of metal music's historical and global gender imbalance to investigate why this genre is such an impenetrable fortress for female musicians and how it could change.