‘It’s a matter of eating or being eaten’ Gender positioning and difference making in the heavy metal subculture

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study how gender difference and ultimately female gender positioning are created and manifested in the heavy metal culture. The empirical material consists of single interviews and focus group interviews with heavy metal fans between the ages of 18 and 26. The overall finding is that while gender is a moveable position in general, women move their gender position to a greater extent than men, as they are forced constantly to adhere to the male values of the heavy metal culture. Three dualities in the positioning of heavy metal women illustrate this phenomenon: a ‘whore/goddess’ paradigm based on the knowledge of the female heavy metal fan; the balancing act of ‘acting male’ and ‘looking female’; and the gender ‘twilight zone’ of being insufficiently male for heavy metal culture while being insufficiently female for the mainstream world.

Keywords

Difference gender heavy metal positioning representation

Introduction

For me, the hours after the concert were a fog of alcohol, drugs, interviews and babes. I remember seeing Tom Zutaut’s girlfriend when I left the stage; she had been taking all her clothes off except for a leopard pattern bikini because of the heat. I grabbed her, pressed my sweaty face against hers and put my tongue in her throat. (Neil Strauss and Mötley Crüe, 2002: 123)

The beginnings of heavy metal music and culture are considered generally to be in the late 1960s, making heavy metal culture roughly 40 years old. Over these 40 years, the culture has progressed in terms of its music and audience. From the 1960s, heavy metal culture has been described as a blue-collar, white, masculine social phenomenon which sprang from the disappointments of excluded youth and a lack of vision for the future in industrial cities (Weinstein, 2000). Other explanations consider heavy metal culture as an integration of the masculine biker culture and the free-spirited and freely gendered hippie culture, both of which make foundational claims on heavy metal characteristics, themes and jargon (Weinstein, 2000). Although heavy metal culture has been thought of generally as a macho and heteronormative subculture, it has been simultaneously characterised by a subversion of traditional gender stereotypes. With the glam rock of the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example, a new sense of style emerged that drew heavily on androgyny (Weinstein, 2000). With people of all genders using make-up, teased hair, earrings and jewellery, the style expanded traditional views of what was commonly accepted as visually male and female. Moreover, the late 1970s and early 1980s produced the new wave of British heavy metal. Many of the style elements found in relation to that particularly masculine and heteronormative school of heavy metal are reminiscent of the contemporary emergence of the gay leather subculture (Tucker, 2006). Thus heavy metal functions as a melting pot of genres, styles and gender positions. However, what appears to be a fixed culture at first glance actually contains great internal divergence – apparently. The visual differentiation of gender creates difficulties in pinpointing where gender is a constitutive factor for the culture, or where the culture is a constitutive factor for the construction and reproduction of gender. It is evident that there is a need to look beneath the surface of this macho subculture, with its experimentation with gender positions, and to explore individual and collective stands on gender in heavy metal culture.

In this article, the aim is to highlight how difference is expressed in the representations and practices of heavy metal fans toward those both within and outside of heavy metal culture. Ultimately, this examination relates to how female gender is constructed in relation to, and what it means to be a woman within, heavy metal culture.

Literature review

Although research on heavy metal fans and issues of gender is scarce, a few studies should be mentioned. While not primarily handling the topic of gender, Friesen (1990) is one of the first to acknowledge the traditional gender roles of heavy metal subculture, especially noting women’s tendency to downplay their visual femininity and men’s tendency to elevate these visual feminine expressions. However, Friesen (1990) makes no elaborations on the dynamics of these gender positions. Krenske and McKay (2000) show that even while heavy metal fans lean toward expressing rebellion against society and its assumed norms, they seem to reinforce conventional gender regimes between men and women, particularly in terms of how women are positioned within the culture. Many women claim that the reason for participating in heavy metal culture is to reject the image of the ‘stay at home’ girl. However, heavy metal culture does not change women’s positions in the sense of equalising them with male heavy metal fans, according to Krenske and McKay. In fact, the opposite is true. Women in heavy metal culture are ‘kept in place’ and can be seen as moving from one oppressive context to another (Krenske and McKay, 2000). Similar phenomena have been observed in studies of other musical subcultures such as punk, straight edge (Mullaney, 2007), and rock (Groce and Cooper, 1990).

In Robert Walser’s (1993) Running with the Devil, the author theoretically analyses gender in heavy metal culture by discussing patriarchal structures, the exclusion of women and the simultaneous existence of misogyny, androgyny and romance. Walser problematises what appears to be a unified image of heavy metal culture by using questionnaires, borrowed music video analysis and his own analyses of song lyrics and music videos. Walser contends that although heavy metal culture is aesthetically challenging to male cultural sentiments, it reproduces – and always will reproduce – male hegemony. Similarly to Walser, Friesen and Helfrich (1998) have done content analysis on lyrical themes and representations within heavy metal culture, although not focusing on the subjective experiences of the subculture’s individuals. The sociologist Deena Weinstein (2000) provides a brief analysis of heavy metal as a male-oriented culture and, like Walser, highlights the underlying male characteristics of that culture without extensive interview material. The present study takes a different methodological approach, by using interviews of different kinds to examine subjective individual positions and collective stances. By using actual heavy metal fans as a point of departure, it replaces some of the general discussions by Walser and Weinstein with a deeper analysis of the intersubjective intricacies of gender as experienced by heavy metal fans. However, in defence of the above-mentioned research, much may have happened in the heavy metal music scene since their publications, calling for further theoretical and empirical revisions of subcultural and social phenomena. Apart from these studies, other musical styles, such as hip hop (see among others, Munoz-Laboy et al., 2007), and alternative rock (see among others, Schippers, 2000) and goth (Wilkins, 2004), have been given more attention.

Method

Participants

The empirical background of this article consists of six focus group interviews and four single interviews conducted with heavy metal fans between the ages of 18 and 27. A letter explaining the purpose of the study was distributed through the Swedish alternative online community ‘Helgon’ (‘Saints’), using an extensive search function available on that community’s homepage. Participants were categorised by gender, age and geography and included 19 males and seven females. All female and all male Helgon users in the Gothenburg area received a call for interview, and the ratio of women to men in the community was roughly 1:3. The groups consisted of multiple people from the same band or circle of friends.

Procedure

Focus group interviews can be riddled with problems of peer pressure. However, the social psychological mechanisms of people belonging to the same culture can be highlighted to a greater extent in focus group interviews than in single interviews (Fern, 2001). Nonetheless, the importance of the subjective culture, or each individual’s own perception of their culture, must be highlighted (Fern, 2001). The combination of single interviews and focus group interviews was productive for integrating the subjective and collective perspectives through which to understand this particular social phenomenon: an integration which prior research lacks. The aim of these interviews was not primarily to pinpoint the respondent’s gendered relationship to heavy metal. However, their outcome relies heavily on the way that the individuals position themselves intersubjectively in relation to other people in terms of style, genre, power and, of course, gender. The questions asked primarily revolved around being a heavy metal fan in general, but a number of them were directly gender-thematised: for example, questions on what it means to be a woman or a man in heavy metal culture, why there are so few women playing in bands, and why women are needed in the culture. The women tended to linger longer to these kinds of questions than the men.

Data analysis

The analysis takes place on three thematic levels: the individual, the collective and the collective against society. Important events, symbols and metaphors as well as distinct similarities and differences in individual and collective narratives are underlined. Overall, a hermeneutic standpoint is applied in which individual narratives (the ‘part’) are viewed in relation to the narratives and practices of the collective and the outside world (the ‘whole’). A possibility for future research would be to emphasise the gender issue in interviews, which would enable a deeper examination of the viewpoints of men concerning gender.

Findings and discussion

‘Doing’ heavy metal

People become subjects by creating differences from others. To develop a self, one must define what one is not. Being hip hop means not being punk rock, being old means not being young, and being a man means not being a woman. In this sense, the identity of social groups grows by downgrading other groups. Positioning oneself in a social in-group shields one against the outer world. This strengthens the image that a person holds of themselves and their peers while simultaneously creating a fragmentary and often incorrect view of people who do not fit into one’s in-group criteria. (Bauman, 1990).

The simple rules of positioning described above do not mean that we can develop an unbiased sense of self within ourselves or merely in relation to the in-group to which we think we belong. On the contrary, the ‘self’, or how we position the self, is constructed in a complex interaction between contextual discourses and individual action (see Foucault, 1980). Discourses are seen here as ways of interpreting reality: They not only frame how we see, talk about and conduct our everyday lives, but they also determine how we are not supposed to act or think. Discourses are constructed not only from linguistics but also from material objects and bodies. This means that movements, space, clothes, tattoos and language are all types of discourses that affect how we act as subjects (Butler, 1999, 2005; Foucault, 1980; Winther Jörgensen and Phillips, 2000). Stuart Hall (1997) stresses two vital points about how we create subjects: our tendency to identify difference from others, and the way that we position ourselves through representation. Representation can be understood as the discourses used for positioning, they determine who one ‘is’. We constantly use our objects, clothes or bodies to emphasise similarities with or differences from others. We also use these representations to interpret other people and to determine ‘who’ they are. In this article, these basic differences are exemplified by people who listen to heavy metal and those who do not, or those who are regarded as men and those who are not: such differences must be understood intersectionally. Gender does not exist in isolation, separate from other power-related asymmetries such as culture, class, ‘race’ or sexuality (West and Fenstermaker, 1995). While this article focuses on difference constructed through musical styles and gender, this does not imply that other asymmetries could not have been used to interpret the material.

The concept of ‘doing gender’, as developed by Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987, 2009) within symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, has been used since in a variety of different ways, probably most notably by Judith Butler (2004) (see also Messerschmidt, 2009). Although we do not want to position the ways of using the concept of doing gender throughout this theoretical history as something dichotomously different from each other, as this would prove a simplification and a rather unproductive one at that, there are a few slight differences in approach between the original symbolic interactionist perspective and that developed by Butler (cf. Lykke, 2010). One such difference is the extent to which gender is possible to change, where Butler takes more initiative to talk in terms of the dynamics of gender: for example, through also using the term ‘undoing gender’ (Butler, 2004; cf. West and Zimmerman, 2009). In this article we will mainly use ‘doing gender’ according to Butler (2004) in order to emphasise positional movements, resistance and change, although we also will draw on inspiration from other theories and concepts closely related to Butler.

Gender is not a dialectical, immoveable position; rather, it is a diverse practice consisting of different positions and perceptions (Hare-Mustin, 1987). The approach to gender in this article is that it should be seen as a practice that is made continually through social relations (cf. West and Zimmerman, 1987). Gender must be enacted through repetition. This means that to become a woman you must repeatedly ‘do womanhood’ by acting out discourses that are believed to be connected to being a woman. Therefore, discourses about what a woman ‘is’ become ‘real’ through repeated applications. Judith Butler (1999, 2005) calls these actions ‘performative actions’. However, because we all merely perform based on an image of what a woman really ‘is’, it is not possible to perform ‘womanhood’ flawlessly. Butler (1999) claims that performativity often leads to ‘failure’ and, by extension, to the risk of changes and disturbances in discourses regarding gender. Heavy metal can be understood as an activity performed in the borderland between different discourses.

Because gender and other positions are connected to power relations, it is important to understand how power can be understood and how it interrelates with gender. Foucault (1980) indicates that little value exists in researching who does or does not have power, because power relations are created through production and reproduction: contextual premises that create possibilities for the subject to act (Butler, 1999; Foucault, 1980). Power oppresses and reproduces, but it simultaneously strengthens and reproduces (Staunæs, 2004). Therefore, it is important to examine how power relations are constructed and how they affect the subject. Because different discourses often work in tandem, they leave space for people to act against power (or with power), and they open up possibilities for people to position themselves differently, depending on the context. Therefore, it is important to focus not only on who has power in a particular moment, but also on situations where people resist power relations (cf. Staunæs, 2004).

Because sexuality and gender are tightly bound together, how we do gender often relates to how we do sexuality. Often in western society, heterosexuality is used to keep men and women in certain power relations: this means that institutions, actions and relations perpetuate heterosexuality as something natural. The bipolar classification of men and women is closely connected to a view of heterosexuality as the correct way to live. However, as with gender, the heterosexual norm must be continuously produced and reproduced to maintain its hegemonic position (Butler, 1990; Rosenberg, 2002). Therefore, it is important to illuminate how sexuality and gender interact, and how this interaction affects the life of the subject.

Initiation and difference

Among the main indicators of the different treatment of women and men within the heavy metal community are the requirements, or initiation rituals, that allow them to gain entrance.

What separates the poser from the true heavy metal fan is if he’s doing the whole ‘I know what this is’. Sure, you can say the wrong things, and you’re usually drunk, but if someone claims that he’s been listening to Deicide since ’92, and then you play something from one of their records and say that it’s Morbid Angel’s best CD, and he agrees, well then you know that it’s just something he says in order to fit in. He doesn’t listen to it at home, even if he says it. (Eric)

Well, it’s not like a competition in who knows the most, but you do take it seriously and it’s so genuine that, if you find someone who obviously does not know – I mean, you won’t look down on the girl working as a cashier at the grocery store because she doesn’t know anything about heavy metal – but if there is someone at the same party who is desperately grasping for that feeling of belonging, they miss the point somehow. Still, you can’t hold a grudge against people for being new to the genre. (David)

In contrast with this discussion between two male heavy metal fans on the topic of heavy metal knowledge, certain practices function as initiation rites specifically for females. Matilda describes a type of ‘interrogation’:

Interviewer:

Being a girl or a woman in the metal scene, what does that mean?

Matilda:

Wow. Well, I guess it’s a lot of defence. You need to be prepared that the first questions will be, ‘Does your boyfriend listen to heavy metal? Do you listen because your boyfriend does?’ It’s a lot about the boyfriend, about being someone’s girlfriend. Being a girl in the heavy metal world means being a girlfriend or a groupie – both of them are roughly the same. You need to be stronger and show that you are knowledgeable about the music, more as a girl than as a boy. I had to go through interrogations: ‘Well then, what is the name of their drummer? What was his name before that?’ It was as if it was OK to question me …

Interviewer:

But when you’ve passed the test, what happens?

Matilda:

Then all of a sudden you are tough as hell, the coolest girl in the world, absolutely – but you need to pass it. It’s dangerous, I think, that among the heavy metal people there are women who really want to be these dedicated heavy metal chicks but aren’t. If you are exposed at that point, you are not worth shit. It’s a matter of eating or being eaten.

The type of male described by Matilda clearly sees himself as having the dominant position in relation to females, and uses the power implicit in the test to reproduce his own male appreciation of heavy metal. Lauraine Leblanc (1999), who has studied women’s ability to penetrate the masculine punk subculture, claims that women go through different stages of establishing subcultural credibility (cf. Mullaney, 2007). The interrogation described above is an example of this. The type of testing to determine whether a person is a knowledgeable heavy metal fan seems to apply to both men and women. However, three important differences require consideration. First, men are the ones setting the agenda for when, how and on what terms a person is allowed entrance into the heavy metal in-group: thus they make use of their dominant position, which becomes evident when the man initiates the interrogation and views Matilda as ‘belonging’ to her heavy metal boyfriend (a position that we will investigate later). Second, no margins of error exist. As previously described by David, the interrogator has decided that Matilda is not knowledgeable. Third, the path from being seen as an inauthentic heavy metal fan to being seen as a knowledgeable one appears to be longer for women, and is populated by women who have not been as successful in demonstrating their credibility – who are not, in Matilda’s words, ‘worth shit’. These women may seem to be involved in the culture only to fit in, as in the case of the Deicide fan mentioned above. By describing heavy metal culture as ‘eating or being eaten’, Matilda rejects the collective sense of in-group belonging in favour of an individualistic view of the heavy metal fan. However, this perspective contrasts with the view of her as her boyfriend’s possession. Such statements demonstrate how heterosexuality is used as a normative foundation on which differences between men and women are constructed (Butler, 1990; Rosenberg, 2002), and thus that the in-criteria used to degrade other groups (Bauman, 1990) also can be used as a power tool against people inside the in-group – in this case, women. According to the logic above, women cannot be fully involved in the subculture if they are not someone’s (i.e. a man’s) girlfriend.

Interestingly, there is an subsequent aspect that contrasts sharply with the interrogation described by Matilda. If a girl successfully manages the interrogation, she is as ‘tough as hell, the coolest girl in the world’. This change indicates the way that knowledge is superordinate to gender, even though the testing prior to this stage can differ significantly between men and women.

Previously, we mentioned the advantage of men within the heavy metal subculture as the ones who set the agenda. Another statement from the male participants illustrates the ‘before’ and ‘after’, the categorisation of a woman as a ‘whore’ on the one hand, and nearly a goddess on the other:

Eric:

There are girls who are just ‘the fuck’, a skank that can tag along just for the sake of it, and then there are girls like Sarah [nods in her direction], who just totally invest in it, play in bands and growls like, well, you know …

David:

She knows the art of it, all of it.

The strong contrasts in the statements above underline the meanings of authenticity and credibility, and how women should act to assimilate into the heavy metal community. The absence of any problematisation of men’s ability to ‘know the art’ further indicates the men’s dominant position and the inclination to assert their ‘higher’ position in relation to something of ‘lower’ authenticity (Taylor, 1992). The complex interaction between contextual discourse and individual action, which Foucault (1980) has underlined, applies here. Individual actions, such as knowing the art of heavy metal, are judged in light of contextual discourse. In this sense, the woman can be the all-knowing, ‘tough as hell’ heavy metal goddess with an understanding of heavy metal morals. This should not be taken as a granted possibility for women in general to ultimately and profoundly earn the title of authentic heavy metal fan. However, it can prove to be a test done on individual basis which can grant women of special and fundamental proliferance access as full worthy members of the subculture. Yet one must acknowledge that how worthy a female member can become remains the outcome of male testing and approval, and as such it proves a constant context to women’s authenticity claims.

Practices and representation

A second point that emerged from the interviews is how difference is constructed through what Hall (1997) refers to as representations. According to this notion, clothes, make-up, jewellery and similar attributes are especially important. Two distinct outlooks on gender and representation apply here. First, the chosen, or ‘staged’, representational difference between oneself and others is emphasised. Second, the issues that are not chosen for representation are accounted for; demarcation lines divide not only men and women in heavy metal culture, but also male heavy metal fans of the masculine and androgynous varieties. For example, Walser (1993) claims that a certain amount of exclusion is inevitable in the glam rock subgenre, particularly in terms of its androgynous trademarks. The genre of glam rock is described in the empirical material as ‘poser’ music that is informed more by clothing than by dedication to the music. Hampus even goes so far as to claim that glam rock is unimportant to the heavy metal scene: ‘I guess glam rock isn’t popular with, well, the “true” heavy metal fans.’ Hence, due to its feminine values and aesthetics, the glam rock genre is marked by the same kind of stigma as the girls in heavy metal prior to their ‘interrogation’, or those who tag along for the sake of it. This stigma supports the idea that heavy metal fans strive to maintain a heterosexual norm. If men move into an androgynous middle ground in terms of representation, the bipolar classification of gender is threatened. However, the way that heavy metal fans dress joins them together within the subculture, and establishes differences from others. For men, using make-up or clothes that traditionally are linked to women can be considered to be a means of provoking and exaggerating difference:

It is really fun to make other people angry, to jump around in [the city centre] on a Saturday with, well, what I’m wearing now [looks at himself]. These are no guy’s pants, they are girls’ pants. I have boots with bandannas, the whole kit. I have like a pen on my face, eyeliner. I haven’t used rouge, thank God, but it is probably something about having people look down on you, I love that feeling! At least I have something; I’ve got a style and an image. Ok, I might look like my mom but I’m still kind of cool. It is so fucking lovely to make people angry. (Linus)

The man in this example uses clothes connected with women and make-up to maintain distance from others; he begins and ends his comment with the pleasure of making people angry. Linus plays with masculinity by wearing androgynous styles of clothes and accessories; however, it is difficult to determine whether he identifies with this role or merely uses it as means of agitating people who harbour stereotypical ideas of gender. By saying that he does not use rouge, ‘thank God’, he demonstrates a normativity in relation to his manliness, a chosen representation as opposed to one he refuses to affect. Here, representation is simultaneously a positioning against society in general and a positioning against being ‘too girly’, though carrying many trademarks of ‘girlyness’ (cf. Hall, 1997). This androgynous style is a mask that he uses in the city centre to provoke people rather than something with which he identifies authentically, thus his approach to his own behaviour falls between the glam rock and general societal views of androgyny. Nowhere is this style defended in terms of gender.

The participants in this study seem to agree that the hegemonic image of a member of the subculture is male, which indicates that Linus clearly is staging his own representation of the androgynous heavy metal fan. He maintains a certain amount of distance from the representation. However, men who stage a representation that is not fully accepted by the heavy metal subculture are likely to benefit from being male. Women within the culture may feel the need to use either more refined methods or exaggerations to maintain their heavy metal personas, and to distance themselves from people outside the culture. For women, long hair, tight trousers and make-up are insufficient. An example of how women stage representations to gain acceptance in the culture is as follows:

Annica:

You need to be pretty tough. You can’t get run over by men. We discussed a [female] band called Hysterica and … we think it’s wrong that heavy metal women, when they play … Because it’s so rare for women to play music, they need to be extra tough and metal to the bone. Every band name is ultra-metal, corsets, vinyl, leather…

Lisa:

They need to be so convincing: ‘We are metal!’

Annica:

And we are girls!’

One can argue that women in the heavy metal scene undergo multiple tests of knowledge, representation and authenticity, and are tested in more explicit ways than are men. Moreover, it appears that women take on male ideals by exaggerating the message of heavy metal in their self-portrayals, as seen above. Underlining this point, Leblanc (1999) claims that discussions on authenticity and credibility often revolve around questions of who is closest to the masculine ideal of the subculture. In this context, the women talk about the use of corsets, a classic garment that simultaneously signifies feminine features and physical and mental male oppression (Steele, 2001). Being metal and being female, as noted by Annica and Lisa, imply that the members of the band must balance the act of being metal and male in their actions, while being metal and feminine in their appearance. The representation above could be a Goffmanian stage representation (Goffman, 1990), where exaggerations in representation are expected. However, being a woman and a heavy metal fan in everyday life can result in unwanted problems with positioning and representation:

In one way you can feel really hip. You have quite a lot of jewellery and it takes quite a lot of make-up. In that sense you are really [feminine] … But even though you feel kind of, well, I don’t know … You don’t fit in as a girl in some ways. I can feel that at least, when I am at school. (Marie)

When the same representations are used by people inside and outside of the subculture, the staging of difference becomes more complicated. Because jewellery and make-up are common to both the heavy metal subculture and larger culture of the ‘outside world’, other differences must be created. Here, what is used to mark difference is a general feeling of being outside of mainstream ‘girliness’, whether by acting differently, using different jargon or other factors not described in the quote. Other experienced differences, which may be difficult to express verbally, can position women simultaneously as belonging neither to the mainstream nor to heavy metal culture. This creates a gender-oriented ‘twilight zone’ that supports Butler’s (2005) thoughts on the difficulties of performing gender accurately. What qualifies as correct in one context can be problematic in another, or problems may manifest through gender in all contexts:

I discovered that, when one of my female friends and I were in Stockholm and stayed over at a friends’, and they said, like: ‘You are so cute. How come you look like that?’ They probably had some image of heavy metal fans as kind of ugly. (Marie)

The image of a heavy metal fan is clearly that of a man who is stereotypically seen as ugly. Annica’s friends emphasise that her looks are unflattering and that she has attractive and feminine features beneath her heavy metal persona. What constitutes correctness in style and attributes within heavy metal culture appears male and unflattering when judged by women outside of the culture. This contradiction underlines the difficulty for women in maintaining a consistent gender identity inside and outside of the heavy metal world. It also emphasises the extent to which heavy metal culture consists of typically male characteristics in the eyes of both heavy metal fans themselves and people outside the culture. Undoubtedly, men are better able to maintain a more uniform gender identity than women. If heavy metal is characterised as being male and ugly, then females must ‘ugly down’ and step away from their own gender group and the possibility of upholding classical female features in the eyes of the outside world.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this phenomenon. Although they are always subject to discursive and contextual negotiations or power manifestations, female heavy metal fans maintain both immoveable and moveable gender positions. The women in heavy metal culture have the ability to do the ‘girl thing’, using jewellery and tight trousers, for example. They also have the ability to balance female visual cues while acting the part of a male heavy metal fan. However, the reverse scenario is unimaginable, even when the glam rock male must accede to a certain discourse on what is female while using the same visual cues. To stay ‘true’ to the heavy metal subculture, women must embrace a seemingly one-dimensional and immoveable gender position, which is the male position. The male participants eagerly portray their own gender as the point of departure for all heavy metal fans, which further enhances the subjectively experienced dominant gender position.

Apart from upholding a heavy metal appearance, the single most important practice of the heavy metal fan is playing music or using instruments. While this is a somewhat common practice among male heavy metal fans, women are much less represented within this realm of the heavy metal world. As evidenced throughout the interviews, being a practising heavy metal musician is seen as higher status and, according to the women’s narratives, a sanctuary of sorts against accusations of inauthenticity:

Malin:

It’s so fun, especially as a girl you can feel that you are simply more accepted. As a girl playing, you show that you are really into it … But then again, you will always be categorised as girls, girls playing girly metal. It can come to that.

Lisa:

But when you stop seeing yourselves as a girl band, I guess that’s when you can just stop caring about it, or when you see yourself as a musician. Other people do that too.

Annica:

Now I become happier if someone just criticises my skills instead of someone saying, ‘Well, she’s a girl, she can’t play’. It happens that people do actually say what they think instead of just judging you.

Malin:

Or saying something like ‘God, you are good … for a girl!’

Lisa:

We get that a lot.

Malin;

The terrible thing is that we get that from girls too. That’s the worst thing.

Annica:

But it’s like, when you know a guy who is a truly good musician and you walk up to him to tell him that, even though you know that you are better at it. It’s just because you’re a girl.

Malin claims that the fact that she plays music shows that she is dedicated and is more accepted by others as a heavy metal fan, in much the same way as men. Playing ‘girl metal’ can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Annica wants people to criticise her musical skills, which reflect her position as a heavy metal fan, rather than judging her in terms of her position as a female musician in the heavy metal community. The girls oppose being judged on their abilities based on their gender, as indicated by the assessment of being ‘good … for a girl’. This type of criticism implies that certain categories are fixed, and that comparisons between female and male musicians are impossible. The female musicians express disappointment about receiving similar comments from other women. A clear rivalry exists concerning claims of authenticity: women are required to prove their worth to the men who dominate the culture, even in relation to other women. The needle’s eye of authenticity seems so narrow that only those with exceptional musical ability can pass through. An apparent problematisation of the gender position in heavy metal culture emerges when reading the above transcripts. However, a contradiction exists within the practices, such as when Annica talks about complimenting another musician, even though she knows she is far better at playing music. A continuous distinction exists between the power that oppresses the women and the strength of the individual in this context, as Staunæs (2004) suggests. The women are aware of the risk of being questioned and criticised, and they know that they must play music to be truly accepted. This struggle highlights Matilda’s ‘eat or be eaten’ sentiment, and identifies an individualism that calls for females to be tough in order to play music. Musicianship also obtains its high value from its complexity and inaccessibility; it is something for which women must fight. It is a testimony of the will to resist power relations and, in the long run, to challenge stereotypical views of the male, heterosexual hegemonic power of the heavy metal subculture. If women fight, they strengthen themselves and their position within the heavy metal subculture, proving that oppressive power can be overcome when an individual’s self-understanding and self-positioning within the culture are strengthened.

Conclusion

Becoming a man or a woman in the heavy metal culture is the result of different forms of positioning. Constructing difference from others, both inside and outside of the culture, is vital in terms of exaggerating what one is not: this is a form of negation positioning. The exaggerated distance from others is established through a number of practices, such as initiation rites of interrogation and playing music, which are aimed at keeping people in certain categories. Gender positions are not immoveable as such, as Hare-Mustin (1987) points out. The sense of self of the women in this study is constructed in a complex interaction between context discourses and individual actions, as Foucault (1980) would claim. Even so, what is evident from this empirical material is that the women are doing much more ‘moving’ around than men: they are subject to change in relation to contextual discourses to a greater extent than the men. This is the problem with heavy metal culture, and shows that the result of this study concurs with that of Krenke and McKay (2000). Men set the agenda for the culture, deciding through initiation rites and questioning which women are ‘worthy’ heavy metal fans, actively making it difficult for women to get in and to stay in; thus, women are in constant movement according to the perspectives and positions of their own gender. Despite actively problematising the gender issue (to the extent that the female perspective has become predominant in the empirical material of this study), women rarely seem to have opportunities to directly question men’s positions. This renders the male gender seemingly fixed in comparison. However, while men engage in practices that maintain heavy metal culture in relation to male values, so do women. In a way, men perform male gender, as do women to some extent (compare Butler, 1999). Apart from this, women in the heavy metal culture constantly negotiate their value in the culture in light of three dualities, as mentioned previously: the ‘whore/saint’ paradigm, where they are either goddesses, if they have extensive knowledge about heavy metal, or whores, consigned to being someone’s ‘hang around’. Surprisingly, knowledge can be superordinate to gender, although the woman must actively promote this image. This proves that women can show proliferance with and knowledge of the culture to an extent where she is deemed a full worthy member, although this is always performed and judged in the light of classic male sentiments, whether expressed visually or by action. Furthermore, it is judged on an individual basis, while men are more or less collectively granted a place within the subculture. Second, women (and, in some instances, androgynously dressed men) are subject to the balancing act of being masculine in their heavy metal actions (acting, playing instruments, using jargon) while being feminine in their looks. Exaggerating one’s femininity, both in practice and in appearance, threatens the bipolar classification of gender on which male dominance in heavy metal culture rests. Lastly, women can become caught in a gender-oriented ‘twilight zone’ in which they do not truly belong to the female gender in the mainstream world as a result of a constant effort to tone down their femininity as heavy metal fans, despite perhaps never being fully accepted into the male-oriented culture of heavy metal. As a final remark, we would like to add that the women in this study do bear witness to a strength and ferocity in taking their place in heavy metal culture, hopefully rendering most of these research findings obsolete in the future.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Biographical notes

Susanna Nordström is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, Örebro University. Her compilation thesis revolves around the construction of identity in the heavy metal culture. Four themes are processed: authenticity and identity, recognisability and visual identity cues, alienation, rebellion and positioning within the culture, and gender identity.

Marcus Herz is a PhD candidate in social work in the Sociology Department, Örebro University. Currently he is working on his thesis about gender and ethnicity in social work. His research interests include gender, masculinity, ethnicity and youth.

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