Women and Femme Voices in Metal Music, Culture, and Scholarship

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.

Jasmine Hazel Shadrack is an adjunct professor at the Don Wright Faculty of Music Research and Composition, Western University, Canada and a Lecturer in Music at MK College, UK. Her monograph Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity, and Sound: Screaming the Abyss was published in 2021. Francesca Stevens is an operatic soprano, metal musician, and Lecturer in Music at The Academy of Music and Theatre Arts, Falmouth University, UK. She specialises in critical feminist musicology primarily within the field of metal music studies.

Foreword by Sarah Kitteringham, Foreword by Kat Shevil Gillham, Introduction by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack and Francesca Stevens. Part 1: The White Boys Club: HIStories, Legacies, and Heritage includes Women's Rescription in Metal's Past, Present, and Future: (Re)writing Metal Canons and Histories by Francesca Stevens, Alien Sounds Versus Endemic Sounds: Women's Presence in Metal Bands by Hale Fulya Çelikel Soganci, Women and Live Music: 'Five Quid in or Show Us Your Tits' by Rosemary Lucy Hill, Not all Bodies are Free to Express Themselves: A Brief Study of Growling from a Material, Measurable, and 'Metal' Symbolic Perspective by María de la Luz Núñez, Calm Like a Bomb: Latin American Female Metalheads on Patriarchal Bias and the Potential to Create Safe Spaces by Marisol Pérez Pelayo, Powerful and Fucking Furious: Trauma, Women, and Metal by Kate Quinn, Angela Glaves, and Samantha Barton, Slow and Accelerating Violence at the Edge of Apocalypse: Black Metal's Dark Ecosophy as Strategy of Resistance Against Climate and Social Breakdown by D Ferrett. Part 2: The Age of Men is Over: HERstories, Reclamation, and the Future includes Women on the Margins: A Discussion by Women in Heavy Metal Studies: Amber Clifford-Napoleone, Rosemary Lucy Hill, Laina Dawes, and Jasmine Hazel Shadrack by Amber Clifford-Napoleone, 'Where Nightshade Black and Mandrake Grow': Dolour as Black Metal Witchcraft, Our Strategy of Resistance by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack, Heathen Pilgrimages: Women and Nonbinary People Finding Belonging within Black Metal and Neofolk by Kayley Margarite Whalen, Everything Burns: Lingua Ignota and the Counter-Actualisation of Repetition by Lexi Turner, We Deserve to Have a Space Here: Reclaiming Extreme Metal as a Space to Elevate Feminist Voices by Melissa Straker, Sister Outsider, Sister Love: Embodied Metal Practices of Reconnection, Reconciliation, and Resonation for Decolonising the Body by Susana González-Martínez, Star Attraction in Contemporary Metal Music: Interpreting the Vocal and Physical Work of Alissa White-Gluz by Lori A. Burns.