Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches

by Florian Heesch (Editor, Contributor), Niall Scott (Editor)

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Music

282 pages, Hardcover

Published July 18, 2016

Reviews

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plus an extra half-star for the general concept--there aren't too many books of this stripe out there. An interesting collection overall, but wildly varied in quality, with more than a few authors relying on outdated critical modes and theory, or rehashing well-worn topics (gender and sexuality beyond the binary don't appear as often as one might expect; race is elided in many chapters). Stand-out chapters include Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone's "Metal, masculinity, and the queer subject," Niall Scott's "The monstrous male and myths of masculinity in heavy metal," and Marcus Erbe's "'This isn't over 'til I say it's over!': Narratives of male frustration in deathcore and beyond." I'd read entire books devoted to Rosemary Overell and Hugo Ribeiro's topics of masculinity and metal genrefication in Osaka and Aracaju. A mostly-stimulating, sometimes-frustrating read for armchair metal theorists.

[D'Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mostly skimmed this. But I do want to say I am glad it exists because as a lesbian who loves heavy metal, I think about gender and sexuality and how they relate to the genre a lot. I found this book to be really interesting overall.