Slashing through the boundaries: Heavy metal fandom, fan fiction and girl cultures

This article explores the creation and circulation of online fan fiction about heavy metal performers. Heavy metal fan fiction, which is overwhelmingly created and consumed by young women, allows girls not only to actively assert themselves within this form of music fandom, but also to renegotiate hegemonic codes of hyper-heterosexual masculinity within heavy metal discourses. The queering of metal masculinity through slash (male/male) fiction further demonstrates how such practices deconstruct heavy metal’s gender norms and actually slash the rigid strictures of metal masculinity in the process. These constellations of sexuality, gender and metal fandom have thus enabled girls to redefine their own resistant spaces within a masculinist subculture.