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Metal and Sexism
Abstract
Chapter 6 considers the allegations that hard rock and metal is sexist. Talking to British women fans reveals that in their experiences, hard rock and metal is less sexist than the ‘mainstream’. Using research on sexism across a range of fields, Hill argues that understanding what counts as sexism is complex and requires critical work by fans when sexism is normalised. Listening to what fans say about the context of their experiences within their broader lives is vital for better understanding. The author argues that the genre provides moments in which women fans may gain a feeling of genderlessness. Ultimately, however, the feeling of liberation only comes through assimilation into the culture, a culture that ignores women as much as possible. Nevertheless, that temporary feeling is a valuable one.
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The under-representation of women in the UK engineering and construction sectors seems resolute. Using a Bourdieusian lens, this article examines the persistence of everyday sexism and gender inequality in male-dominated professions. Bringing together findings from three research projects with engineering and construction industry students and professionals, we find that women experience gendered treatment in everyday interactions with peers. Patterns of(mis)recognition and resistance are complex, with some women expressing views which reproduce and naturalise gender inequality. In contrast, other women recognise and resist such essentialism through a range of actions including gender equity campaigning. Through a Bourdieusian analysis of the everyday, this article calls into question existing policy recommendations that argue women have different skills that can be brought to the sector. Such recommendations reinforce the gendered nature of the engineering and construction sectors’ habitus and fail to recognise how the underlying structures and practices of the sector reproduce gendered working practices. Author post peer review version available here: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/39968/
This paper examines and reconceptualises transgression in the Leeds extreme metal music subculture through theories of performance, embodiment and spectacle. The spectacle, for Debord (1967), is a social relation that is alienating and mediated by images and technology. At a live extreme metal concert fans subvert social norms, challenge gendered expectations, and disregard hegemonic norms of etiquette and decency. Moshing is the most visible and sensuous example of transgression within the extreme metal scene. It is an aggressive, physically demanding performance which embodies resistance to the impersonal and disillusioning world of the spectacle (Halnon 2004). The pit is a transgressive space that is itself transgressed by women who participate in this masculine, chaotic space, disrupting the homosocial bonds of male solidarity (Gruzelier 2007). This paper offers an ethnographic account of a female metal fan participating in the transgressive practice of moshing within the Leeds metal music scene-a moshography.
This article links HE neoliberalisation and ‘lad cultures’, drawing on interviews and focus groups with women students. We argue that retro-sexist ‘laddish’ forms of masculine competitiveness and misogyny have been reshaped by neoliberal rationalities to become modes of consumerist sexualised audit. We also suggest that neoliberal frameworks scaffold an individualistic and adversarial culture amongst young people that interacts with perceived threats to men’s privilege and intensifies attempts to put women in their place through misogyny and sexual harassment. Furthermore, ‘lad cultures’, sexism and sexual harassment in higher education may be rendered invisible by institutions to preserve marketability in a neoliberal context. In response, we ask if we might foster dialogue and partnership between feminist and anti-marketisation politics.
The past decade has seen a growing political and academic concern with boys' underachievement. Drawing on the case study of a London primary classroom, this article argues that contemporary gendered power relations are more complicated and contradictory than the new orthodoxy that girls are doing better than boys suggests. The girls in this case study took up very varied positions in relation to traditional femininities. Yet, despite widely differentiated practices, all the girls at various times acted in ways which bolstered boys' power at the expense of their own. While peer group discourses constructed girls as harder working, more mature and more socially skilled, still the boys and a significant number of the girls adhered to the view that it is better being a boy. The article concludes that in this particular primary school, girls and boys still learned many of the old lessons of gender relations which work against gender equity.
I suggest sociality depends on affective encounters between individuals in particular spaces.
Through an ethnography of Melbourne's grindcore death-metal scene, I examine how belonging in a music scene is constituted by scene members’ affective encounters. In particular, I suggest that a “brutal” disposition is necessary for cultivating the affective intensities necessary for experiencing belonging in the scene. Using scene members’ own understandings of “brutal” I shift from iconic representations of “brutality,” common in other metal scenes, toward a brutal affect. Here, brutality is experienced as a set of embodied intensities, difficult to articulate, but crucial to understanding how scene members cultivate belonging – in the grindcore scene, and in scenic spaces.
This paper is basically about terminology. In it I discuss the terms 'masculinity' and 'femininity' and how they relate to being male and being female. My theme arises from an increasing difficulty that I am finding in understanding how individual identities relate to dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity. Christine Skelton and Becky Francis argue that we should not be afraid to name certain behaviours as masculine even when they are performed by girls. After a discussion of the problems of defining both 'masculinity' and 'femininity', and a consideration of the power relations between these terms, I go on to consider the concept of 'female masculinity' (Halberstam). I argue that this formulation is problematic, due to its dependence on a main term whose definition is unclear. Finally, I argue that we need to distinguish 'masculinity' and 'femininity' from 'masculinities' and 'femininities'.
This is the first ethnographic study of women’s popular music-making. It is based on over 100 in-depth interviews as well as participant observation by the author, a sociologist, who has herself played in various bands since punk. Bayton covers the period from the late 1970s until the mid 1990s, focusing mainly on women instrumentalists in female and mixed bands. Amongst others, interviewees include Skin from Skunk Anansie, Debbie Smith from Echobelly, Candida Doyle from Pulp, Gail Greenwood from Belly and L7, Natasha Atlas from Transglobal Underground, and Vie Subversa from Poison Girls. Although female vocalists have always been common, women playing instruments in bands are still proportionally rare. Frock Rock explores the social factors that keep women from playing and those routes that have enabled women's involvement. The book then examines the everyday worlds of women's music-making from bands just starting up to the professional stage: songwriting, rehearsing, the first gig, getting a manager, record companies, recording, and touring. Easy to read and packed with fascinating quotes, Frock Rock makes an invaluable contribution to the field of popular music studies and will become a key text in cultural studies, media studies, women’s studies, and sociology of culture courses.
Goth Culture explores Goths’ expressive practices of dress, fashion, style and the body, in relation to issues of identity and representation. The book shares vivid accounts of the author’s experiences exploring gender and sexuality and doing fieldwork in the Gothic subculture. Through the voices of Goths from the UK, US and Germany, it draws the reader into the gender-bending and heavily gendered world of Goth. It reassesses the significance of the dress of both male and female Goths, examining these striking and often highly creative subcultural fashion displays. Using a wide range of methods and sources, from ethnography to critical examination of music, literature, social theory and different types of popular media, Goth Culture offers an original and accessible analysis of the fashion, media and counterculture of the Gothic world.
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.
As feminist scholars, and heavy metal fans, it has been regularly pointed out that the two positions are inconsistent, ontologically and politically, given the linkages between misogyny and metal in public and scholarly discourse. Weinstein used sociology to inform public discussion of heavy metal; but given our own epistemology, we thought it would be interesting to analyse heavy metal through a postfeminist lens. Postfeminism contains a set of contradictions: on the one hand it contains claims that feminism is no longer necessary, the battles have been won; on the other, it argues the need for feminism is ever more urgent. These tensions can be explored with reference to postfeminist notions of ‘empowerment’ and we argue that there are similar contradictions in heavy metal. To make this argument, empirically we have explored what is happening on stage and in audiences at festivals and at the intersection between bands and audiences. We use postfeminist theorizing to inform our discussion, as a mechanism to unpack the ways in which heavy metal can be both empowering (sexy) and problematic for women (sexist). Understanding the tensions between and the duality of these positions also enables us to understand predominantly masculine cultures. We argue that where heavy metal is situated as marginal it may provide a site of empowerment where women are liberated from mainstream hegemonic patriarchal structures. In this sense, heavy metal provides a site where patriarchy may be destabilized. Paradoxically, we argue, this site of empowerment may also be limited by masculine definitions of the extent to which gender norms may be subverted.
On first inspection, the metal music subgenre of folk metal might be arguably residual white, masculine spaces. The subgenres are not fashionable within the metal music scene. Folk metal bands are ridiculed by fans of black metal for being too mainstream and crowd-pleasing, constructing fantasies of drinking and fighting that have no authentic connection to Vikings, Saxons or other (supposed) nationalist patriarchs. But folk metal bands are not part of the mainstream of modern heavy metal, judged by sales of records and numbers of fans on social media. This article draws on new research on folk metal and its reputation within heavy metal, using a range of Internet sources and semiotic analysis of folk metal bands’ songs and images. The bands at the focus of the case study research are bands that have been deliberately selected because they are well-established in the industry, and generally known to fans of heavy metal: Turisas (Finland), Týr (Faroe Islands), Eluveitie (Switzerland), In Extremo (Germany) and Cruachan (Ireland). In this article, I argue that folk metal is not easily dismissed as a fantasy space for young, white European men left behind by postmodernity, postcolonialism and a rearrangement of the gender order. Rather, folk metal remains central to the ongoing construction of heavy metal as a form of commodified leisure that makes the power of western, instrumental whiteness and hegemonic masculinity invisible, while ironically being in plain sight.
Women’s right to exercise choice has been one of feminism’s central political claims. Where second wave feminism focused on the constraints women faced in making free choices, choice feminism more recently reorients feminist politics with a call for recognition of the choices women are actually making. From this perspective the role of feminism is to validate women’s choices without passing judgement. This article analyses this shift in orientation by locating women’s choices within a late modern gender order in which the ideal of choice has increasingly been associated with a new form of femininity characterized as self-determining, individuated and ‘empowered’. Instead of offering an effective analysis of the changing social conditions within which the relationship between feminism, femininity and individual choice has become increasingly complicated, choice feminism directs criticism at feminist perspectives characterized as overly prescriptive. This critique fails to appreciate how feminist ideals have been recuperated in the service of late capitalism and neoliberal forms of governance. By failing to engage critically with processes currently impacting on the social organization of gender choice feminism aids in the constitution of an individuated neoliberal feminist subject which performs cultural work vital to the reproduction of neoliberal governmentality.
The continuing expansion of the field of metal music studies has evoked an increased interest from scholars to critically explore women’s participation within heavy metal, along with other axes of identity, from a variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.
Since Weinstein’s ([1991] 2000) canonical sociological study of heavy metal the notion that heavy metal is masculinist remains theoretically pervasive in gendered analyzes of heavy metal and its practices. The upcoming special issue ‘Metal and Marginalization’ signals the
‘disruptive return of the excluded’ (Butler 2004) whereby concepts of marginalization, inclusivity and agency are called into question. Drawing upon my own doctoral research, this article deconstructs the synonymous and obstructive relationship heavy metal has with masculinity
by focusing on women’s embodied practices. Influenced by Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity and poststructural notions of ‘equality’ and ‘inclusivity’ (Butler et al. 1997; Scott 1988), I discuss how heavy metal scenes should be considered spaces of
equality and potentiality as they permit different performativities and understandings; thus, creating real pathways for doing metal fandom differently.
This article examines the relationship between extreme metal and gender, specifically the sexual representation of women in a relatively obscure ‘underground’ metal subgenre that developed in the 1990s dubbed porngrind. This is a subgenre of metal that fuses the lyrical content and sound of death metal with a sustained focus on sexual explicitness, sexual violence and misogyny, and it is best represented by underground American and European bands such as: Soldered Poon, Anal Penetration, Anal Whore, Waco Jesus, Lividity, and Meatshits. The article explores the relationship between porngrind and feminist positions on pornography, most significantly the anti-pornography approach of Andrea Dworkin. The article argues that porngrind centrally reflects the salient perceptions Dworkin levels at pornography within her seminal text, Pornography: Men Possessing Women: that it expresses patriarchal oppression and sexual violence against women. However, the article contends that the subject-matter of porngrind actually identifies a degree of proximity between it and Dworkin in that they both perceive pornography to be reducible to, and representative of, sex as an act of domination, brutality and the aggressive possession of female bodies.
Pretty in Punk takes readers into the lives of girls living on the margins of contemporary culture. Drawing on interviews with 40 girls and women between the ages of 14-37, Leblanc examines the lives of her subjects, illuminating their forms of rebellion and survival. Pretty in Punk lets readers hear the voices of these women as they describe the ways their constructions of femininity-from black lipstick to slamdancing-allow them to reject damaging cultural messages and build strong identities. The price they pay for resisting femininity can be steep-girls tell of parental rejection, school expulsion, institutionalization, and harassment. Leblanc illuminates punk girls' resistance to adversity, their triumphs over tough challenges, and their work to create individual identities in a masculine world.
The study examined the relationship of popular music preferences to individual differences in social judgments and to personality characteristics. Individuals who expressed liking for heavy metal music were higher in machiavellianism and machismo and lower in need for cognition than nonfans. Heavy metal fans also made higher estimates than nonfans of consensus among young people for sexual, drug‐related, occult, and antisocial behaviors and attitudes. Punk rock fans were less accepting of authority than those who disliked this music. Punk fans also estimated higher frequencies than nonfans of antiauthority behaviors such as owning weapons, committing a crime, shoplifting, and going to jail. The results are discussed using interactive and social‐cognitive models for the acquisition of stable social attitudes and personality characteristics.
This article examines women’s involvement in the male-dominated death metal scene and illustrates the boundaries to their participation in the scene as equals. Interviews with female fans of death metal reveal an awareness of the sexist practices of the scene, as well as a willingness to tolerate such practices. The author discusses the attitudes and behaviors of female fans in this context using social exchange theory and argues that while women derive empowerment from death metal, they do so at the cost of conformity to its androcentric culture.
This article considers the relevance of geographical theories about gender roles and how gender is performed, to the situated context of a local DIY ('Do It Yourself) punk scene. It draws on an auto-ethnographic study carried out by the author between September 2008 and May 2009, which explored the themes of the body, gendered performativity and gendered spatialities. The study was based on the author's observations, reflections and conversations with other participants at live music events ('shows') in a particular region of the UK, but also revealed how DIY punk offers an example of an imagined community, crossing temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries with a sense of belonging and collective identity expressed by participants. The study illustrates the complexity of the relationship between punk ideologies and practices and the ways that spaces can simultaneously offer contradictory and negotiable opportunities for empowerment and resistance, acceptance and exclusion.
While lad's magazines such as FHM and Loaded have been subject to critical attention with respect to the way they represent and negotiate models of masculinity, there has been a significant absence of work that addresses the representation of women in these and other publications, such as Zoo and Nuts. In this paper I argue that these magazines normalise pornography through an invocation of the “real,” by encouraging reader action and interaction, and through alignment with women's magazines. The construction and representation of the “real” is difficult to reconcile with the claims of irony used to excuse representation of women as sexual objects. Such claims are indefensible and are symptomatic of hegemonic gender norms in which women are not yet recognised as human.
Recent developments in feminism, charted in Gender, Place and Culture over the past 21 years, have stressed the relational, differentiated and contested nature of gender. This has led to the rejection of the unified category women, and with this the right for feminism to make claims on behalf of all women. This paper argues that an unintended consequence of this development in ways of thinking about gender is that patriarchy as a form of power relations has become relatively neglected. It draws on research from a European Research Council project (including biographical interviews and case studies of a gym and workplace) to demonstrate that while the development of equality legislation has contained the public expression of the most blatant forms of gender prejudice, sexism persists and is manifest in subtle ways. As a consequence, it can be difficult to name and challenge with the effect that patriarchy as a power structure which systematically (re)produces gender inequalities,is obscured by its ordinariness. Rather, sexism appears only to be ‘seen’ when it affords the instantiation of other forms of prejudice, such as Islamophobia. As such, we argue that Gender, Place and Culture has a responsibility going forward to make sexism as a particular form of prejudice more visible, while also exposing the complexity and fluidity of its intersectional relationship to other forms of oppression and social categories.
The purpose of this article is to study how gender difference and ultimately female gender positioning are created and manifested in the heavy metal culture. The empirical material consists of single interviews and focus group interviews with heavy metal fans between the ages of 18 and 26. The overall finding is that while gender is a moveable position in general, women move their gender position to a greater extent than men, as they are forced constantly to adhere to the male values of the heavy metal culture. Three dualities in the positioning of heavy metal women illustrate this phenomenon: a ‘whore/goddess’ paradigm based on the knowledge of the female heavy metal fan; the balancing act of ‘acting male’ and ‘looking female’; and the gender ‘twilight zone’ of being insufficiently male for heavy metal culture while being insufficiently female for the mainstream world.
Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from Dragnet to The Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. Ultimately, the book argues that through analyzing how television genre operates as a cultural practice, we can better comprehend how television actively shapes our social world.
This article focuses on the juvenile justice system in California and outlines approaches currently taken in response to teenagers who are part of the “punk” and “heavy metal” subculture. Data were collected from hospitals that have adolescent care programs. When these hospitals were given a hypothetical situation in which the parents' main problem with their child was the music he or she listened to, the clothes he or she wore, and the posters on his or her bedroom wall, 83% of the facilities believed the youth needed hospitalization. These findings were placed within a labeling framework in order to understand the effect of these policies.
This article focuses on the complex negotiations undertaken by professional feminist women in Britain with the discourses of anti-sexism,¹ `political correctness' (`PC') and sexism, specifically in relation to their choice of titles and surnames. Rather than seeing these discourses as sets of permissible or forbidden practices or lists of words/phrases, I have preferred in this article to adopt a theoretical position, based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which tries to see these discourses as hypothesized positions with which many women negotiate (Bourdieu, 1999). Thus sexism, anti-sexism and `political correctness' must be seen, not as separate discourses functioning in isolation from the others, but as all working at the same time to define the limits and possibilities of the others. The pressure exerted by the interaction of these three positions seems to be `played out' on key words or phrases which function as sites of struggle, and which seem to define what can be seen as these women's social identities, constructed as they are within a variety of different communities of practice, each with different alignments with sexism, anti-sexism and `political correctness'. The question of which surname and title to use is one of those sites of struggle for many women who have some affiliation with feminism. Particularly in the present post-modern moment, rather than seeing feminist interventions in relation to discursive practices as concerned simply with reforming sexism, this article argues that, in addition, many feminists are concerned with appropriating practices which might be viewed as sexist and inflecting those practices differently, making them work for them, thus leading to potential changes in the ways that those practices are viewed in general.
The effects of sexually violent music on undergraduate males' (N = 75) attitudes toward women, acceptance of violence against women, and self-reported sexual arousal were evaluated. The experimental manipulation involved exposure to sexually violent heavy-metal rock music, Christian heavy-metal rock music, or easy-listening classical music. One month before the experimental manipulation, participants were administered two covariate measures (religious orientation and sex-role orientation); the Attitudes toward Women Scale; the Sex-Role Stereotyping, Adversarial Sexual Beliefs, Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence, and Rape Myth Acceptance subscales from the Sexual Attitudes Survey; and a sexual arousal index. The results indicated that males with an extrinsic religious orientation were more accepting of sexist and rape-supportive beliefs. Exposure to heavy-metal rock music, irrespective of lyrical content, increased males sex-role stereotyping and negative attitudes toward women. An unexpected finding was greater self-reported sexual arousal in response to classical music. Results are discussed with respect to participant and stimulus characteristics and experimenters' gender.
This article analyses gendered structures of power in a heavy metal (HM) music club. Although both male and female HM devotees often declare that they are engaged in a rebellious activity, this romantic conviction sits uneasily alongside the HM scene's reinforcement of conventional gender relations and identities. Although many women gravitated toward the HM setting in order to escape stifling adolescent situations, they wound up in another oppressive context. Both the forceful corporeal practices of men and the highly gendered structures of power meant that women 'did' gender on men's terms. HM texts, narratives, identities, and corporeal practices constituted a complex and contradictory gender regime that literally kept women 'in their place'.
‘Girls Like Metal, Too!’: Female Reader’s Engagement with the Masculinist Ethos of the Tabloid Metal Magazine
- Andy R Brown
Don’t Mess with Mother Nature. Spin Magazine
- Will Hermes
Letter to the Editor
- Resh Giwa
Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock
- Mimi Schippers
- M Schippers
R)evolution Now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender
- Norma Coates
- N Coates
When Jane Likes Cannibal Corpse: Empowerment, Resistance, and Identity Construction Among Women in Death Metal
- Jamie Patterson
Femme-liminale: Corporeal Performativity in Death Metal. Metal and Marginalisation: Gender, Race, Class and Other Implications for Hard Rock and Metal Symposim
- Jasmine Shadrack
Getting My Soul Back’: Empowerment Narratives and Identities Among Women in Extreme Metal in North Carolina
- Jamie Patterson
This is Spinal Tap. Embassy Pictures
- Rob Reiner
Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture
- Lauraine Leblanc
- L Leblanc