ABSTRACT
The broad genre of hard rock and metal is often described as male-dominated and ‘masculine’. This chapter discusses women’s ‘readings’ of hard rock and metal via critical discourse analysis of what the British women fans spoke during the author's doctoral research said about the music of the genre and their favorite bands. It prioritizes women fans’ experiences of the music and examine how they discuss the pleasure they derive from their favorite bands. The chapter employs discourse analysis to consider the language that women use to describe hard rock and metal music and their favorite bands, and offers a complex picture of women’s musical pleasure that challenges previous accounts. Common sense understandings of hard rock and metal as masculine owe much to the ways in which certain sounds are construed as ‘masculine’.
