Exclusion and inclusion in Australian metal
Author Identifier
Laura Glitsos: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2576-6371
Clint Bracknell: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9808-1624
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Title
The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
72726
Abstract
On the surface, Australian metal music can be read—quite fairly—as a white, working-class, hypermasculine phenomenon. With further excavation, however, the way metal music materializes in local Australian scenes around the country in various ways reveals its power in negotiating complex structures of identity and belonging. Australian metal music is paradoxical and complex, and fans ‘use’ metal in a variety of political ways. Quite specific to Australian metal music, too, are the ways in which it has long been constructed as a frontier space—a space sitting ‘on the edge’ both geographically and politically, wherein metal’s tendency for extremes—its celebration of brutality, and its perpetuation of hegemonic white masculinity—is only matched by its potential for counter-hegemonic politics, radical change, and boundary-pushing. The Australian frontier functions symbolically in our reading, both as a space dominated by the centralizing figure of the colonial white man, but also as a precarious space in which women’s resilience and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s agency in pushing back against colonial normativity rise to destabilize the accepted narratives of invasion politics.
DOI
10.1017/9781108991209.012
Access Rights
subscription content
Comments
Glitsos, L., & Bracknell, C. (2024). Exclusion and inclusion in Australian metal. In A. Harris & C. Bracknell (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia (pp. 173–187). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108991209.012