The Women of Doom: An Ethnographic Study of Women's Experience in Doom Metal

The Woman fan, musician and industry professional are on the rise in heavy metal culture. It has been noted that women fans make up a third of the global heavy metal fan base and there is reason to believe that this number is gradually increasing. However, in both scholarly and journalistic literature heavy metal is still, generally understood as a masculinist and misogynist genre. But what this fails to acknowledge is the strong and ever growing participation of women in the culture. This paper aims to highlight and validate the valuable experience of women in metal culture, drawing from an ethnographic case study of ‘The Women of Doom’ an informal social group of women doom fans in Birmingham, UK. Using ethnographic research, literature from fan and cultural studies and relying heavily upon feminist theory this paper demonstrates the empowering experience of being a woman in doom metal, including an intersectional analysis of race, gender and sexuality in relation to fan-based musical passion. The fundamental goal of this research is not to merely write a ‘herstory’ of metal but (as Walser (1993) claimed ‘excription’: the writing-out of women in metal) that of ‘re-scription’, writing women back into metal: where they have, indeed, been all along