ABSTRACT
In recent decades, metal scholars have begun to pay more attention to women in extreme metal, mostly in death metal. Interviewing women in death metal mostly in Texas, Vasan’s research findings argue that these women are willing to subscribe to masculinist codes as a cost-reduction strategy to experience empowerment and liberation through their involvement with the music. This chapter aligns itself with both Hill’s discussion of ‘genderless’ experiences in the metal scene and Walser’s readings of gender in which metal allows individuals, including women, to perform ‘identity work’, playing with gender, or becoming temporarily un-marked as women, and in the process obtaining power formerly only available to men. It seeks to understand how women in the death metal scene employ tropes of empowerment and belonging that contest or reject the cultural construction of the ‘female’ in mainstream American society.
