This article examines debates in Kerrang! magazine around emo’s position in the metal community. The author asks: Why is emo vilified and rejected in British metal magazines, what can debates around emo reveal about the gendered nature of metal, and what potential for new envisionings of metal do they encapsulate? As the only British weekly magazine to focus on metal and hard rock, Kerrang! fulfils a pedagogical role in the metal community, establishing a canon of musical works, and a history and ideology of the genre. Fans are vividly represented in its letters pages, their words and images used to disseminate Kerrang!’s ideology of metal. The reported increase in female readership in 2006 has been attributed to the coverage of “emo” bands, such as My Chemical Romance, who have a majority of women fans. This coverage has provoked debate and censure in the magazine’s letters pages, debate that illuminates gender relations and allows new consideration of the gendering of the metal community. Inspired by Barthes’s Mythologies, the author performs a semiotic reading of Kerrang!’s June letters pages between 2000 and 2008 in order to understand the gendered myths forged and propagated by the design, images, content and editorial treatment portrayed. Employing Thornton’s concept of the gendered mainstream, the author delineates the implications of Kerrang!’s myths for female fans, arguing that the influx of female emo fans reading Kerrang! has caused a revolt amongst fans of more established metal bands, who represent the magazine and emo as feminised, akin to the mainstream. The author concludes that whilst debates around emo are rooted in the metal community’s conservative ideas about gender, the presence of many vocal young fans open to ideas of fluidity of gender allows us to conceive of a more inclusive metal community in which gender boundaries are less constrained.
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