City Research Online

Abstract

The aim of this study is to understand how and why heavy metal in Japan has accepted, absorbed, and normalized female participation while women have remained marginalized in the rest of the metal world. Heavy metal music and its corresponding culture have long been considered both a social and sonic masculine space rooted in notions of hegemonic masculinity regardless of where its transnational expansion has developed scenes. Despite shifts over the last few decades in the gender complexion of metal’s increasingly diverse global audience and increased female participation in the fields of metal journalism and metal-inclined academia, hegemonic masculinity is still considered part of heavy metal’s bedrock constitution thus sustaining and animating the genre’s aural and visual tropes. However, in Japan, women operate at the commercial and artistic core of heavy metal music and have done so as a well-kept secret largely escaping the notice of Western metal fans and media, and certainly the attention of metal academia. I have identified four key components to this phenomenon which are all unique to the Japanese cultural context. These include the absence of masculine associations with instrumentation and music socialization in Japan, ‘occidental longing’ and constructions of an often private and personal ‘oppositional femininity,’ a divorce of masculinity from standards of genre authenticity, and the use of a public ‘familiar femininity’ to gain acceptance in Japanese popular culture. The result of this examination then calls into question long-held theories of heavy metal’s masculine essentialism in understanding how localized cultural domains and subdomains of music develop in the transnational flow of genres.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity > Performing Arts School of Communication & Creativity > School of Communication & Creativity Doctoral Theses Doctoral Theses

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