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Palgrave Macmillan

Gender, Metal and the Media

Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music

  • Book
  • © 2016

Overview

Authors:
  1. Rosemary Lucy Hill

    1. School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

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  • Challenges the idea that heavy metal is masculine music
  • Offers a new examination of damage done by myth that all women fans are groupies
  • Explores the musical pleasure offered by metal to women fans

Part of the book series: Pop Music, Culture and Identity (PMCI)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
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  2. Gender, Metal and the Media: An Introduction

    • Rosemary Lucy Hill
    Pages 1-26

  3. Hard Rock and Metal as an Imaginary Community

    • Rosemary Lucy Hill
    Pages 27-45

  4. The Media and the Imaginary Community

    • Rosemary Lucy Hill
    Pages 47-81

  5. Women Fans and the Myth of the Groupie

    • Rosemary Lucy Hill
    Pages 83-104

  6. Listening to Hard Rock and Metal Music

    • Rosemary Lucy Hill
    Pages 105-132

  7. Metal and Sexism

    • Rosemary Lucy Hill
    Pages 133-158

  8. The Gendered Experience of Music

    • Rosemary Lucy Hill
    Pages 159-170

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 171-184
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Keywords

About this book

This book is a timely examination of the tension between being a rock music fan and being a woman. From the media representation of women rock fans as groupies to the widely held belief that hard rock and metal is masculine music, being a music fan is an experience shaped by gender. Through a lively discussion of the idealised imaginary community created in the media and interviews with women fans in the UK, Rosemary Lucy Hill grapples with the controversial topics of groupies, sexism and male dominance in metal. She challenges the claim that the genre is inherently masculine, arguing that musical pleasure is much more sophisticated than simplistic enjoyments of aggression, violence and virtuosity. Listening to women’s experiences, she maintains, enables new thinking about hard rock and metal music, and about what it is like to be a women fan in a sexist environment. 

Reviews

“Gender, Metal, and the Media is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening book. Readers will leave energized, thinking about gender and fandom in new ways. With its solid use of subcultural theory, this book’s primary audience would be scholars of subcultural studies, but it should also be of interest to scholars and students of media, culture, and gender studies.” (Elizabeth Cherry, Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 18 (1), December, 2017)

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Rosemary Lucy Hill

About the author

Rosemary Lucy Hill is Lecturer in Sociology at University of Leeds, UK. She researches gender, popular music and big data. She has published on the metal media, the moral panic around emo, subcultural theory and semiotics. She appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed on the subject of women fans, metal and subcultures. 

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