Queerness in Heavy Metal Music

This book focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos. Heavy metal scholarship has until recently focused on the roles of heterosexual hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity in fans and performers. The dependence on that narrow dichotomy has limited scholarship, resulting in poorly critiqued discussions of gender and sexuality that 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.

Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Nance Collections at the University of Central Missouri, USA.

Introduction 1. Heavy Metal Queerscape 2. Black Leather 3. Outsider Togetherness 4. Everybody Knows 5. Eat Me Alive Conclusion