Whiteness With(out) Borders: Translocal narratives of whiteness in heavy metal scenes in Norway, South Africa and Australia.

Abstract

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

When love and critique collide:1 Methodology, ontology, fandom and standpoint in metal research

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