‘Girls like metal, too!’: Female reader’s engagement with the masculinist culture of the tabloid metal magazine

Abstract

Like participation in heavy metal music culture, the tabloid metal magazine has a predominantly male audience. Yet readership data indicates that such magazines also have regular female readers. Drawing on a comparative sample of six best selling UK and US magazines this chapter explores how female readers engage with and negotiate a metal female identity through their reception and interaction with metal magazine culture. Moving beyond textual ideology approaches to a more complex account of how the circuit of production and consumption of magazine culture offers a range of reader invitations to subjectivity, from the relatively consensual to the more problematic, this chapter explores female reader responses to challenging areas of metal culture, including overt sexism and the less obvious but more widespread ‘symbolic annihilation’ of female musicians and non-musicians as fans and participants in metal culture.

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