Queerness In Heavy Metal Music

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.

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.

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.

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 eBook is a snapshot of the Second Global Conference of Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics held in Salzburg, November 2009. Following on from the first Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics Conference in 2008 and hard on the heels of the Metal and Gender Conference in Cologne, October 2009

Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities. This exciting cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, cyborg, transsexuality, and dildo. Based on a constructivist concept of gender, Leibetseder asks: ’Which queer-feminist strategies are used in rock and pop music?’ ’How do they function?’ ’Where do they occur?’ Leibetseder's methodological process is to discover subversive strategies in queer theory, which are also used in rock and pop music, without assuming that these tactics were first invented in theory. Furthermore, this book explains where exactly the subversiveness is situated in those strategies and in popular music. With the help of a new kind of knowledge transfer the author combines sociological and cultural theories with practical examples of rock and pop music. The subversive character of these queer motifs is shown in the work of contemporary popular musicians and is at the same time related to classical discourses of the humanities. Queer Tracks is a revised translation of Queere Tracks. Subversive Strategien in Rock- und Popmusik, originally published in German.

Metaldata: A Bibliography of Heavy Metal Resources is the first book-length bibliography of resources about heavy metal. From its beginnings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, heavy metal has emerged as one of the most consistently popular and commercially successful music styles. Over the decades the style has changed and diversified, drawing attention from fans, critics, and scholars alike. Scholars, journalists, and musicians have generated a body of writing, films, and instructional materials that is substantial in quantity, diverse in approach, and intended for many types of audiences, resulting in a wealth of information about heavy metal. Metaldata provides a current and comprehensive bibliographic resource for researchers and fans of metal. This book also serves as a guide for librarians in their collection development decisions. Chapters focus on performers, musical instruction, discographies, metal subgenres, metal in specific places, and research relating metal to the humanities and sciences, and encompass archives, books, articles, videos, websites, and other resources by scholars, journalists, musicians, and fans of this vibrant musical style.

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.

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.

Why is gender inseparable from pop songs? What can gender representations in musical performances mean? Why are there strong links between gender, sexuality and popular music? The sound of the voice, the mix, the arrangement, the lyrics and images, all link our impressions of gender to music. Numerous scholars writing about gender in popular music to date are concerned with the music industry’s impact on fans, and how tastes and preferences become associated with gender. This is the first collection of its kind to develop and present new theories and methods in the analysis of popular music and gender. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines including musicology, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy, and media studies, providing new reference points for studies in this interdisciplinary field. Stan Hawkins’s introduction sets out to situate a variety of debates that prompts ways of thinking and working, where the focus falls primarily on gender roles. Amongst the innovative approaches taken up in this collection are: queer performativity, gender theory, gay and lesbian agency, the female pop celebrity, masculinities, transculturalism, queering, transgenderism and androgyny. This Research Companion is required reading for scholars and teachers of popular music, whatever their disciplinary background.