Slashing through the boundaries: Heavy metal fandom, fan fiction and girl cultures

Abstract

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.

Sports Fans and Fan Culture: A Critical Reflection on Fandom as Communicative Leisure in a Commodified World

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“…Fan-created queer content can renegotiate texts to provide more satisfying narratives amidst largely heteronormative mainstream media (Ng, 2008). Slash fanfiction may also demonstrate ways in which individuals with marginalized genders and sexualities redefine and resist patriarchal spaces (Hoad, 2017) and engage in social activism in defiance of practices such as queerbaiting (Hofmann, 2018). However, though a significant amount of recent scholarship casts fanfiction writers' practices as positive and subversive, Pande (2018) notes that such utopic perspectives on fanfiction ignore wider structural inequities that seep into fan communities, which are structured by normative whiteness and heteronormativity and which demand a great deal of time and labor from their participants.…”

Music for Mental Health: An Autoethnography of the Rory Gallagher Instagram Fan Community

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