Keywords heavy metal South Africa Afrikaner scene identity whiteness Catherine hoad Macquarie University 'ons is saam' 1 -afrikaans metal and rebuilding whiteness in the rainbow nation abstraCtThe South African general election of 1994 installed a democratic system of government in a nation that had ruptured by violent segregation since 1948. While the 'miracle' of the Rainbow Nation aimed for a unified state, the redistribution of power heralded by the rise of 'new' South Africa left much of the white Afrikaner population with a sense of loss. The task of the post-apartheid Afrikaner cultural industry is now concerned with finding a place for the Afrikaner in modern South Africa. As such, this article explores how 'Afrikaans metal' has been compliant in fostering a sense of community and encourages sentiments of localized belonging. The passion and dynamism of heavy metal allows for the proliferation of a metal scene explicitly concerned with the promotion of an Afrikaner identity, performing in Afrikaans and creating Afrikaans metal for South African metal fans. However, just as the Afrikaner community at large struggles to find a white identity untarnished by apartheid, Afrikaans metal fans and bands face a similarly complex mission. Afrikaans metal represents a site within which this 'lost' Afrikaner identity can be both reclaimed and contested, and thus renegotiates the role of Africa's 'white tribe' into the twenty-first century. Contributor detailsCatherine Hoad is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her doctoral thesis explores how whiteness, nationhood and masculinity have been symbolically constructed within colonial discourse, and the manner in which the relationship between the three has been represented across global heavy metal scenes.Contact:
This article explores the creation and circulation of online fan fiction about heavy metal performers. Heavy metal fan fiction, which is overwhelmingly created and consumed by young women, allows girls not only to actively assert themselves within this form of music fandom, but also to renegotiate hegemonic codes of hyper-heterosexual masculinity within heavy metal discourses. The queering of metal masculinity through slash (male/male) fiction further demonstrates how such practices deconstruct heavy metal’s gender norms and actually slash the rigid strictures of metal masculinity in the process. These constellations of sexuality, gender and metal fandom have thus enabled girls to redefine their own resistant spaces within a masculinist subculture.
Catherine Hoad is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research addresses the intersections of music scenes, gender and ethnic identity, with a specific focus on mapping the ways in which whiteness is embedded within the dominant narratives of heavy metal communities. Her doctoral thesis explores the processes through which discourses of patriarchal whiteness and white nationalism have been deployed across heavy metal scenes in Norway, South Africa and Australia, and how such narratives are embroiled in broader regional trajectories of masculinity and colonialism. Catherine HoadAbstract This article discusses how narratives of white masculine identity have been deployed in nation--specific ways within heavy metal scenes in Norway, South Africa and Australia. While heavy metal's global spread has allowed more diverse aesthetics to emerge, within these nations it has also constructed rigid boundaries of community tied both historically and contemporaneously to whiteness. This article interrogates how the dominant practices of three heavy metal scenes affirm an 'originary' whiteness that erases its migratory and/or colonial status. In this article I investigate the processes through which discourses of whiteness and white masculinity are translocated and translated from one context to another, enabling spaces of both negotiation and resistance. I address how national heavy metal scenes negotiate these intersections of musicality, whiteness and nationhood in ways that may explore new possibilities for white masculine identities, while also reproducing a rigid politics of power, privilege and exclusion. Introduction As heavy metal experiences wide geographic growth, both its musical style and culture have expanded. However, just as heavy metal's global spread has allowed communities to sound their own particular aesthetics and sociopolitical concerns, this spread has in turn enabled the construction and affirmation of national identity as that which is historically and contemporaneously tied to whiteness and white masculinity. Within such heavy metal scenes, national identity is bound up in the master symbols of nationhood that bear the burden of belonging. Appeals to these symbols allow distinct nationalisms to emerge; nationalisms that are overwhelmingly mandated by whiteness. This has the effect of staging national identity as authentic while simultaneously allowing the erasure and displacement of indigenous culture. The excision of non--white, non--masculine bodies from nationalist narratives extends into the scenic practices of heavy metal. In attempting to 'indigenise' white bodies through
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