Grunting alone? Online gender inequality in extreme metal music. (original) (raw)
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This is a communicative research project that focuses on the treatment of women in extreme metal bands that stem from scenes in Canada. This research addresses the following question: using constructs derived from the Communication Theory of Identity, what are the contributions to studies in extreme metal that can be made by qualitative research on women's experiences of negotiating gender and identity as performers and fans in extreme metal scenes? It also chronicles the history and sounds of extreme metal, and outlines the extreme metal scene in Canada. The methods of inquiry include autoethnography, participant observation, and qualitative interviews. It found that among other challenges, women in extreme metal bands struggle with negative and reactionary responses from both males and females in the metal scene, and how they are represented in the media. Despite these issues, participants in this study identified the increasing number of women in extreme metal bands, and stated that discourse around gender was changing for the better.
Individual Thought Patterns: Women in New York's Extreme Metal Music Scene
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Extreme metal music (EMM) is both an umbrella term and a sub-category of heavy metal, with origins in the early 1980s. It is a complex amplification of heavy metal that has garnered increased attention during the last two decades due to some bands becoming more popular and accessible than anticipated for the styles it comprises. Although women have a small but steady presence in heavy metal, this number shrinks when applied to extreme metal a subculture which has typically been coded as a masculine domain (Purcell 2003; Kahn-Harris 2007; Walser 1993; Weinstein 1991). For women, participating in such an overwhelmingly male-coded environment can incur sexism, marginalization, and misogyny. This begs the question: Why and how do women participate in a genre so often considered to be a man’s domain? By use of ethnographic research, participant observation and interviews, this study surveys female participants (fans, musicians, and music industry workers) in the New York Tri-state area i...
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This chapter will provide a linguistic analysis of the representation of women in the lyrics of the 1980s glam metal band, Mötley Crüe. An analysis of the band's discography gives insight into the roles and characteristics typically accorded to women, shedding light on their perceived role during this time in music history. The way in which male glam metal bands expressed and performed gender could best be described as controversial, even oxymoronic. The machismo and misogyny expressed in most glam bands' lyrics contrast heavily with the performers' feminine appearance and vocals. It has been argued that by appropriating traditionally feminine characteristics, male glam metal bands prove that gender is something that is performed, thus liberating women by subverting traditional norms on gender appearance and behaviour (Sollee 2011; Simon 2014, 59). On the other hand, the intense sexism and misogyny of many glam lyrics, and the actions of artists on and off stage, can be interpreted as precisely the opposite. By appropriating through performance what is socially perceived as feminine behaviours and attributes, while simultaneously behaving in a traditionally macho way, male glam rock artists ended up by occupying all possible roles in the genre, leaving little or no space available for women on the stage and in the music itself.
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A Man Behind Everything? Motivational Sources of Metal Listening Among Female Audiences
Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis | Studia de Cultura, 2023
The term “female metalhead” may sound rather abstract. What does she look like and what does she think? Is there a typical female metalhead? This article summarizes qualitative research on woman’s motivational resources for participation in the contemporary Czech metal subculture. It discusses factors related to why women listen to metal and the role of men in this process. The research is based on seventeen semi-structured interviews with women in Czech metal. Respective research questions focus on female metalheads’ understanding of their position inside the subculture, their visual appearance, reasons for inclination to metal(e.g., partner’s influence or an attraction to the metal community), the issue of sex symbols in the metal industry, and issues of elitism and exclusivity. Results show that women within the metal subculture strike a balance between masculinity and femininity and often judge their surroundings from the perspective on these two poles. However, the primary insp...
On Extremity: From Music to Images, Words, and Experiences, 2023
Performed masculinity that manifests in sonically brutal music, aesthetically brutal lyrics, song names, band names and artwork, must […] represent the male as juridical system that enshrines and perpetuates itself […] reproduc[ing] subjects in its own image […] Foucault notes that “juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent” (qtd. in Butler, J. 1990, p.2). The male as gatekeeper in metal is not only the default authority, but also the hegemonic juridical system that produces and reproduces its masculine frame: the male in metal discourse is the totality. (Shadrack, 2017, p.176) It is one thing to acknowledge how these systems of oppression function in the global metal market, which sells cultural objects full of violence against women as signifiers in their communities of aesthetic practice. Successful signed bands who do this might appear distanced by their status and can be perceived as non-threatening. Yet it is quite another to acknowledge how this information functions underground. How, then, does this filter through to local scenes and underground bands who persistently treat women as less than or disposable when the women are there for their love of metal? There is an assumption that women do not or cannot appreciate metal. In Gender, Metal and the Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), Rosemary Lucy Hill notes that the assumed ‘universality’ of metal is an imagined community. She states that, Even as rock [and metal] critics have peddled this myth, they have underpinned their ideology with the sexist claim that women are incapable of understanding the music as an art form. In this context, what ‘universal’ actually means is relevant to men. (qtd. in Shadrack, 2021, p.26) If women are to be tolerated in metal’s musical spaces, they must be shepherded by male gatekeepers or risk falling into one of the traps first identified by Sonia Vasan in her article “Den Mothers and Band Whores: Gender, Sex and Power in the Death Metal Scene’ (2009, p.69). Women’s commitment to metal, however, means that increasingly we are promoters, journalists, musicians, and sound engineers. We have a right to be in these spaces without the checks and balances that metal’s juridical patriarchy imposes upon us. We have our own sovereignty. By using duoethnography, this article seeks to identify the modes of address and engagement for women in UK underground metal and what we have had to contend with. Through an anonymised ‘conversation’ chapter structure, this seeks to determine the extent of abusive patriarchal practices in the UK’s metal underground, in women’s lives and how, through sisterhood, we use our friendships as strategies of resistance.
From Enslavement to Obliteration: Extreme Metal's Problem with Women
Under My Thumb: Songs that Hate Women and the Women who Love them., 2017
What happens when you love a music form that doesn’t love you back? (Dawes, L. 2013). As a fan and performer of extreme metal for the last twenty years, I and many other women who love metal have observed a problematic paradigm concerning extreme metal and women –more specifically, the obliterated female body, which exists as artwork, lyrical content and in band names. Even though the musical structure, technical and virtuosic playing and production qualities of these songs are undeniably brilliant, the content and ideological packaging can be deeply sexist. From Cannibal Corpse’ ‘Fucked with a Knife’ (The Bleeding, 1994) to Prostitute Disfigurement’s ‘On Her Guts I Cum’ (Embalmed Madness, 2001), it is important to analyse why violence against women exists as aesthetic and lyrical content when this form of ‘extremity’ is a reality for too many women. There is no denying that extreme metal offers its listeners a lot – solidarity, escape, a sense of empowerment – but there has to come...
Understanding Gender and Sexuality in Rock Music
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research. Edited by Allan F. Moore and Paul Carr. Bloomsbury Press, 2020
As an artistic form that circulates widely, rock music shapes and reflects social and cultural values, communicating powerful stories about the ever-shifting dynamics of human agency in society. 1 Douglas Kellner writes that "Radio, television, film and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of 'us' and 'them. '" 2 In the context of popular musical expression, artists adopt strategies for the representation of gendered and sexualized identities that are bound up with the social values, workings of power, and norms of the musical genres in which they operate. Our cultural understanding of these representations are grounded in an appreciation of the specific genre contexts, production and industry factors, as well as aesthetic, performative, and formal features. As social constructs, the identity categories of gender and sexuality are shaped and reshaped by cultural, political, and economic forces that vary over time and across social spaces. This chapter explores a number of analytic approaches to gender and sexuality in scholarly writings about rock music, with the aim of offering a critical review of the primary concepts raised in the interpretation of gendered subjectivities and representations in popular music. The field of inquiry emerged in the 1980s with the pioneering work of scholars such as Barbara Bradby and Brian Torode, whose analysis of vocal expression led to understanding artist subjectivity as residing in the musical materials, and E. Ann Kaplan, whose work on music videos offered tools for the interpretation of visual representations and narratives. 3 During the 1990s, the field burgeoned when authors opened up a range of reflections upon gendered identities and social practices in a variety of popular music genres, upon analytic methods for musical texts, as well as upon theories of reception and postmodern criticism. 4 From the field of gender studies, the seminal writings of authors such as Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam positioned gender performativity as a negotiation of gender categories. 5 The new millennium saw this line of inquiry firmly established with writings dedicated to the subject of popular music and identity, bringing forward the manifold ways in which individual artists navigate the politics of identity in 28
Mining The Motherload: Mastodon's #twerkgate and sexual objectification in metal
This article analyses the metal community’s responses to Mastodon’s controversial video for ‘The Motherload’. Fans and music journalists responded critically to its premiere in September of 2014, largely condemning the highly sexualized images of women of colour onscreen, which sparked debate about objectification, racism, and sexism in metal as a whole. Using a sex positive feminist framework, I unpack the various arguments put forth by dancers in the video, the band itself, and the afore- mentioned critics and fans. I conclude that there is no easy answer to the question of how women should be represented in metal, and that while women and, specifi- cally, women of colour deserve more diverse, humanizing representations, summar- ily condemning depictions of female sexuality is no antidote to prejudice.