3- Female-Fronted Heavy Metal: Agency, Performativity, and Empowerment - Lori A. Burns, University of Ottawa

Part of:
Panel 5 - Heavy Metal Studies
When:
1:30 PM, Saturday 25 May 2019 (2 hours)
Breaks:
Coffee break   03:30 PM to 04:00 PM (30 minutes)
Where:
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) - DS-1520
How:
In recent years, heavy metal has opened up space for “female-fronted metal,” a domain that is treated as a genre itself, even though the artists work in a range of metal subgenres. The acclaimed vocalists of this domain are frequently invited to collaborate as guests with melodically-driven metal bands. Floor Jansen (After Forever; ReVamp; Nightwish), Simone Simons (Epica), Anneke von Giersbergen (The Gathering), Alissa White-Gluz (The Agonist; Arch Enemy) and Elize Ryd (Amaranthe) are five exemplary vocalists who are celebrated for their powerful vocals and creative contributions. This paper examines the following music video collaborations from the genre of progressive metal: Jansen in Evergrey’s ‘In Orbit” (The Storm Within, 2016); Simons and Jansen in Ayreon’s ‘All That Was’ (The Source, 2017); and von Giersbergen in Amorphis’s ‘Amongst Stars’ (Queen of Time, 2018).

My aim is to reveal how the artists inject their own style into the sonic-visual world of the band, posing a number of questions: What degree of performative empowerment is attributed to the guest vocalist? How does her sonic and visual style impact upon and contribute to song expression and meaning? What strategies and ideologies are at play in the representation of gendered and sexualized subjectivities? For this analysis, I will mobilize the concept of “cotextuality” (Burns, Dubuc & Lafrance 2010) to consider the coexistence and interaction of the discursive attributes of the female artist’s text within the host text of the band. The approach responds to writings on gender and sexuality in metal (e.g, Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000; Heesch & Scott 2016; Berkers & Schaap 2018).

Lori Burns
Lori Burns
Participant
University of Ottawa
Session detail
Allows attendees to send short textual feedback to the organizer for a session. This is only sent to the organizer and not the speakers.
To respect data privacy rules, this option only displays profiles of attendees who have chosen to share their profile information publicly.

Changes here will affect all session detail pages