Last minute paranoia

Out of last minute paranoia, I am adding my second final post to my blog...I apologise for what must seem like the height of craziness, but I can assure you, if I could have stopped myself from freaking out and not posting this at the last minute, I would have.

Early in my research for my annotated bibliography, I found and discussed an article by Leigh Krenske and Jim McKay on various sub-groups within the Brisbane metal club, Club Thrash. THough I found several problems with this article - notably Krenske's inability to personally interview several members of the groups she analysed, I found it a valuable insight into the ways in which cultural studies scholars might examine various groups within the metal community.

In light of Kahn-Harris's discussion on gender within his work, (I think I love this man), I'd like to further discuss Krenske's ideas, and combine them with my experiences from my aforementioned night out yesterday eve.

Firstly, I have to say the academics are right - women at the club were relatively few compared to the numbers of men, and were ogled at every turn. Similarly, their respect by most members of the community seemed to be based around their capacity to interact in a scenic, masculine fashion - by moshing, fawning over high-status members of the scene community, and engaging in contests over who knew the most about metal. On the other hand, there were substantial groups of women who did not engage in such activities, and instead interacted without any shred of subservience or desire for approval with the men within the club. This I would personally attribute to social, and scenic change since the years in which Krenske's study was performed - doubtless even within the self-perpetuating and scene of metal in Brisbane, women have become more assertive and respected without having to conform to the social norms of men.

Similarly, on a related note, I noticed that although there was a definite demarcation of various social groups within the club, there was not nearly as much of the parochialism Krenske described in her article, indeed people from all sorts of different metal sub-genre scenes mingled freely and interacted with each other with no sense of self-consciousness or fear. From brief discussion with my friends, we felt this was likely because of the growth of the metal scene within Brisbane - in Krenske's article, Club Thrash almost seems like a sort of heavy metal "Cheers", where everybody knows your name etc. In the substantially larger current Brisbane metal scene, no such groups and social orders can really develop, because of the constant influx of new participants and members. This does slightly alter my conceptions of Kahn-Harris's ideas about the stability of a scene provided by the commitment of its members, but given the broad range of metal played and enjoyed within Brisbane, I think I would hesitate we would require the same sort of stability that a purely EM scene would - indeed any transgressive behaviour I have experienced in clubs didn't seem nearly exciting as Kahn-Harris indicated it should :)

My paranoia assuaged, I shall name this my final post and thank you all (or just you Ian), for reading and hope that it has at least been entertaining if not informative.