The Performance of Gesture: A Feminist Enactment of Heavy Metal
By Tessa Carr and Deanna Shoemaker


"Feminist productions can expose the universal as masculine, the natural as cultural, the textual as political'" (Jonas 244).

Dressed in zebra print lycra pants, black leather boots, gold lame scarves and long ratty rock n’ roll wigs, we saunter down the aisle, sneering, to the front of the conference room. What are two women in heavy metal drag doing at an international conference on Gesture in an upstanding institution like the University of Texas at Austin? As Motley Crue’s “Shout at the Devil” comes on, we begin a rowdy lip synch air guitar concert, flicking our tongues and shaking our pelvises at the bewildered audience of academics. As the presentation progresses, we share personal narratives, photos of ourselves as young heavy metal girls, and perform more heavy metal drag. This example of performance scholarship, entitled “Thugsluts: The World Tour (Sex, Gender, Rock n’ Roll)” might be theorized broadly as a working class feminist gesture of resistance in the academy. More specifically, it is a critical reenactment and investigation of the politics of gesture contained within old photographs and personal memory around heavy metal music. Our focus on gender in relation to heavy metal music positions personal experience as constructed by discourses of class, race, and sexuality. This feminist grounding allows us to theorize the personal and place it squarely within an historical moment. Within performance theory this approach also privileges a non-realistic performance art form, which allows for more critical engagement than a seamless aestheticized performance.

Drawing upon our experiences as white working class teens from small southern towns, this music was central to our identity construction. Sheila Whiteley notes that “popular music locates the pleasures that are available, the sites where desire and power are invested and operationalized, and the possibilities for both determination and resistance” (xiv-xv). We focused our performance critique on heavy metal, a specific sub-genre of hard rock that exploded during the nineteen eighties. Fans' definitions vary widely. Our performance analyzed metal subsets alternately labeled glam rock, cock rock, and light metal, exemplified by such bands as Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Poison, and Guns n’ Roses. This sub-genre was particularly popular with female fans (Walser 133). In trying to transfer an embodied performance into a theoretical text, this paper is organized around the strategies and theories used to create the actual performance.

Rock music, and especially heavy metal, can be a highly spectacular performance bursting with operatic screams, exploding pyrotechnics, huge hair, gaudy costumes, glamorous or ghoulish makeup, theatrical stunts, and yes, white men. The sheer excess employed in the live performance of this music culminates in grandiose and iconic gestures of hypermasculinity. Men strut and thrust and wail across the stage, often borrowing stereotypically feminine signifiers like tight clothing, flowing scarves, heavy makeup, long hair, and/or high heeled boots to construct the image of the lone rebellious male, existing in the margins of society, who is man enough to look girlie while stroking his powerful electrified phallus in public. What place do girls have in this homosocial world where women are either erased or invoked as hypersexualized objects through lyrics and album covers?

There are of course many women who participate as fans of hard rock and heavy metal. When we look back on that time of our lives, we marvel at how we negotiated such a phallic space and found room for our own rage and desire. The sheer excess of heavy metal points to ways in which we, as feminists, could reinsert ourselves into the genre and reclaim our experiences while offering a critique and even an intervention into this pop culture phenomenon. One way to critically engage is through drag, which might be thought of as a series of highly self-conscious gestures that signify differently depending on who is performing and who is watching.

Judith Butler claims that drag parodies the “notion of an original or primary gender identity” and “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself” (137). Lesbian theatre artists like Holly Hughes, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver have taken up drag, typically understood to be gay men who impersonate women, and made it "mean" in new and critical ways. In "Thugsluts," we strategically drag heavy metal men, who are in turn partly dragging femininity, to deconstruct their performance of masculinity and insert the female body in a position of power. Esther Newton notes that part of drag's appeal is its ability to "break the code" of gender norms to reveal the impersonation (65). We attempt to break the code of masculinity by performing a rather ridiculous, parodic drag of a metal band using recognizable rock star gestures of power and stereotypic costumes such as animal print spandex, a flowing “poet’s” shirt, gold lame, long wigs, and black leather. We capitalize on male rockers’ privileged use of masculine and feminine signifiers by publicly putting on our metal wigs and slowly stuffing our crotches to mark the cock that is so predominant in hard rock and heavy metal. Doing this in front of the audience instead of “backstage” disallowed an erasing of the female body underneath the obvious “costume” of masculinity. Within the system of heavy metal, we are the marginalized other who take up drag to deflate power differentials. In this way, a re-performance of patriarchal gestures offers a space for feminist resistance.

As a feminist recovery of heavy metal, we reconfigured our past experiences by using performative personal narratives, what Langellier identifies as "the insertion of a counter-narrative against master-narratives that have disintegrated or fail to represent certain points of view" (126). Thus, our personal narratives served to reinterpret experiences that might be read superficially as merely naive and/or masochistic and thereby insert “the girl” into the metal and rock milieu, a space discursively and physically dominated by males. These stories, theorized in the retelling, were accompanied and punctuated by photographs of us depicting gestures of rebellion, such as head-banging, which we often replicated in performance. The live restaging of these gestures functioned to draw attention to the female body’s complex and simultaneous entanglement with both empowerment and disempowerment. Performance of gesture then becomes an archeology of sorts that excavates and theorizes embedded personal histories. We wanted to ridicule and embrace the posturing of male rock stars, insert our voices louder than theirs, and confront the audience in a completely unfeminine manner. In addition to usurping a traditionally male space, we hoped to push our primarily academic audience to question their attitudes about heavy metal, a genre heavily marked as white working class music or as “bad” rock unworthy of scholarly attention. Finally, we aimed to illustrate ambivalence around our pleasurable participation in a predominantly misogynistic cultural product through performed personal narratives and reconstructed gestures of rebellion, which would historicize our memories and experiences.
Elin Diamond's work using Bertolt Brecht’s theories of historicity as a deployable strategy for feminist performance helped us to theorize our structural techniques. Brechtian performance constructs both points of identification and moments of alienation for spectators, thus forcing them to oscillate uncomfortably between empathic submersion and distance from the performance. The ultimate goal of this strategy is to activate audiences by creating dialogue within the individual spectator as well as within a larger community. Diamond's work speaks to the manner in which feminist performance can employ Brecht in order to defamiliarize gender.

When gender is "alienated" or foregrounded, the spectator is enabled to see a sign system as a sign system – the appearance, words, gestures, ideas, attitudes, etc., that comprise the gender lexicon become so many illusionist trappings to be put on or shed at will. Understanding gender as ideology – as a system of beliefs and behavior mapped across the bodies of females and males, which reinforces a social status quo – is to appreciate the continued timeliness of [Brecht’s alienation technique], the purpose of which is to denaturalize, and defamiliarize what ideology makes seem normal, acceptable, inescapable (124).

In terms of form, we accomplished this effect by putting on and taking off wigs (and thus personas) on stage rather than off stage, disrupting performance frames and expectations with moments of audience participation, and breaking characterizations to blur the lines between character and performer, thus creating a sense of doubled identity. In this way, the performer never “disappears” into the character in a conventional theatrical way but constantly remains present to make the modes of production, or the ways in which meaning is made, highly visible.
Taking this doubled identity a step further, we reflected upon our past rocker girl participation through the lens of our current feminist political identifications. Working to embody our metalhead youth while simultaneously critiquing that youthful participation, we blurred the lines between past and present and demonstrated the idea of identity in process. How could we find pleasure and critique simultaneously? Diamond explains this Brechtian philosophy.

There is a double movement in Brechtian historicization of preserving the "distinguishing marks" of the past and acknowledging, even foregrounding, the audience's present perspective...In historicized performance, gaps are not to be filled in, seams and contradictions show in all their roughness, and therein lies one aspect of spectatorial pleasure – when our differences from the past and within the present are palpable, graspable, applicable (126-127).

Our ultimate purpose lay in pushing audience members to investigate their own cultural participation (or lack thereof) while they witnessed and participated in our exploration.
A specific moment that captures many of these ideas occurred at the end of the show. We symbolically “reinserted ourselves into the rock music canon” by singing AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” to foreground our voices and bodies and disrupt the dominant male voice of rock n’ roll. We began simply by singing along with AC/DC’s lyrics: “She was a fast machine. She kept her motor clean. She was the best damn woman that I’d ever seen.” The presence of our female-marked bodies and raucous voices placed alongside the history of reducing women to inanimate pleasure machines immediately troubled the text. We then took the song over by slowly fading the music out and lowering the key to suit our now acapella voices. By silencing AC/DC so that only our voices were featured, we recontextualized the song into a collective protest against constraints placed on women around gender and sexuality. Also, by turning to each other on the lyrics “Yeah, you shook me all night long,” we attempted to queer the explicit heterosexual desire in the song and reposition it as a means by which to celebrate a female community and identification among women. One female audience member remarked that our solo female voices shouting out the lyrics with pleasure at the end of the performance was a moving moment where theory and practice merged and our political project was most tangibly realized. Ultimately, using gesture to explore constructions of femininity and masculinity within heavy metal culture reveals how the music may be a vehicle for productive anger and desire among women rather than total identification with dominant readings.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Carr, Tessa, and Deanna Shoemaker. "Thugsluts." Unpublished script, March 2001.
Diamond, Elin. "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist
Criticism." A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance. ed. Carol Martin, New York: Routledge, 1996. 120-135.
Jonas, Susan, et al., eds. Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book. Harcourt
Brace, 1997.
Langellier, Kristen. "Personal Narrative, Performance, Performativity: Two or Three
Things I Know For Sure." Text and Performance Quarterly. 19 (1999): 125-144.
Newton, Esther. Mother Camp. New Jersey. Prentice-Hall, 1972.
Walser, Robert. Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal
Music. New England: Wesleyan UP, 1993.
Whiteley, Sheila, ed. Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender.