Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent
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.
Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Nance Collections at the University of Central Missouri, USA.
"Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent is an important addition to Metal Music Studies' commitment to challenging the perception of metal as inherently heteromasculinist through examining metal scenes as sites of potentialities and differing performativities. Metal Bent initiates an understanding of how these performativities may be interrogated in the context of sexuality. The groundwork undertaken here by Clifford-Napoleone may then yield greater plurality in future intersectional discussions of sexuality within metal scenes, practices and cultures."
- Catherine Hoad, Macquarie University, Australia
