Women's Rescription in Metal's Past, Present, and Future

The male has acted as gatekeeper for the majority of discourse in metal, ingraining gender essentialist masculinity into the understanding of the music and its subcultures. This concept is wholly embodied in Robert Walser's (1993) term ‘exscription’ – the writing out of women from metal. Through the analysis of metal canons and histories this chapter offers methods for the rewriting of metal narratives that centre women, arguing that metal studies have not moved beyond the ‘add-on’ stage, as writing is either about metal or about women. The integration of women into metal histories and canons actualises the antithesis of Wasler's ‘exscription’ theory, that of women's rescription. This hypothesis has become the ethos of my feminist practice, re-centring women's voices and writing them back into metal where they have, indeed, been all along.