Coloniality and Gender in the Argentinian Metal Scene: A Study through Four Cases

Abstract

In 2011, when I began to think of metal not only as a passionate musical interest but also as a worthy subject of study with great social import, I had only been able to access scant literature about it, mainly due to the fact that, geographically, I have been far from the texts that are only available in the capital, a metropole. Adding to the logistical limitations, most of the academic texts available online are written in English, a language that was mostly inaccessible to me at that time. Most of these publications described metal in “universal” terms; I eventually came to see this same trend in works written in Spanish. In hindsight, I have come to realize that most of them had been written from a White and Western point of view. Furthermore, most of these works did not have a nuanced critical perspective. In the mainstream collective imaginary, metal is seen as having the same origins as rock; it is argued that the genre emerged from various processes of musical and cultural hybridization between rock music and the blues. For its part, the genealogies of each genre exhibit a strong Anglo-European tradition (Regev 2013). Nevertheless, as many Latin American scholars have highlighted in contrast, there is no single history of metal (Janotti Jr. 2004; Varas-Díaz et al. 2020), despite the apparent influence of White and Western characteristics. In fact, a large number of studies (Wallach et al. 2011; Varas-Díaz and Scott 2016) have demonstrated the dynamism and permeability of metal itself, which has contributed to the emergence of different scenes in various countries around the world. Despite the singular meaning constructed by cultural practices of production, circulation, and consumption of metal, each of these scenes has its own particularities that depend on the local characteristics of their respective contexts. As a consequence, metal scenes carry their own stories from their countries and regions.