Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent

by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

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.

Genres: Music

166 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2015

Reviews

[Camille Lerner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited when I discovered this book and I loved a lot of it, but I found the section that focuses on trans performers deeply disappointing. I was hoping that a book that has "queerness" in the title would contain a more interesting analysis of trans subjects and I certainly didn't expect it to find it offensive. The conclusion to this short section states “clearly, in the heavy metal queerscape, bodily transgression and aggressive extremity demonstrate authenticity, and that is more important to belonging in heavy metal.” To arrive at this point she exclusively discusses trans women and reduces them to their bodies, what surgeries they have or haven’t had and what hormone medications they take. She relays a narrative of these women being accepted by their fans in spite of their otherness and attributes this to the perceived authenticity of bodily transgression in heavy metal queerscape. This point could have been made using a lot more care and sensitivity, trans people are too often essentialised and medicalised. There is a vast scope here for exploring trans embodiment, how it lines up with her exploration earlier in the book of gender as performance and how that relates to themes of bodily transgression in metal. Clifford-Napoleone fails to do much more than perpetuate harmful misconceptions about trans people in order to make a rushed point without appropriate space for explanation or exploration. Through writing in this way, the ‘unnatural’ medicalised trans body reifies the ‘natural’ unmedicalized cisgender body. The otherness of being trans reinforces the normality of being cisgender, in a similar way to how femininity and the omission of the queer subject reifies masculinity in the texts which Clifford-Napoleone criticises earlier in her book.

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty good study, well researched and engages with a rather amazing amount and variety of theory. However, most of the later chapters talk about queer fans’ experiences in the metal scene and never mention manufactured queer performances that male metallers do onstage for a primarily straight female audience (fanservice). (This is a particularly strong component of the Japanese metal scene which was never even alluded to, despite being one of he largest global metal scenes.) You’d think in a chapter on corporeal consumption that even includes a discussion of slash fanfics this would be important to include or at least mention. The narrownesss of the book’s scope in that way limited the book’s effectiveness: how can you argue something about a genre when you only mention less than a dozen different bands, and no underground ones? Still, worth a read and 3.5 or 4 stars because of the level of critical engagement and rarity of a study on metal and gender with such a theoretical discussion.

[Kevin Kai-Wen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, this is no doubt a passionate book dedicated to metal queers. However I find the arguments revolving around fear of the effemine not far from the masculine discourse in metal at all. And the identification of Floor Jansen as an out lesbian is totally troublesome, which is never confirmed.

[Mills College Library]

781.66086 C638 2017

[Moira · Rating 3 out of 5]

When talking about NIN at some points there were some facts that were wrong, which made me very upset. Otherwise great read because I learned quite a bit.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s a good read and a thoroughly researched one - and a needed one.