Women and Femme Voices in Metal Music, Culture and Scholarship: Feminist Strategies of Resistance

Where are the women and femmes in metal music, culture, and scholarship? What are the modes of address and engagement when, as Laina Dawes stated, ‘you love a music form that doesn’t love you back’? This interdisciplinary edited collection focuses on centring women and femme voices in metal music, culture, and scholarship, fostering an intersectional feminist position to analyse the varying perspectives and experiences. There has been a trend, which has also been acknowledged amongst feminist metal scholars, of sidelining and sometimes devaluing those voices that are so valid and important in a male-dominated music culture and scholarship. Contributors challenge and rectify this by: centring intersectional gendered identity; elevating women’s voices, and musical and other types of labour; and foregrounding trauma, herstory, and queering within metal music culture and scholarship. The audience for this edited collection is students and scholars of metal music studies, popular music studies, musicology, performance studies, gender, queer and decolonial studies, cultural studies, ethnography, feminism, trauma, and herstory. The metal music press and metalheads around the world will also be interested in this convocation.