\م/ Metal Music Fandom and Gender Relations in Contemporary Iran

Iran is home to some of the world's most devoted fans of various forms of metal music. These fans go to great lengths to attend concerts, often in neighbouring Turkey, United Arab Emirates or Armenia, to obtain music recordings, usually by downloading, to buy instruments and equipment, and to form bands in Iran. Hardcore fans have detailed knowledge of their favourite musicians' and bands' songs and biographies. Many profess philosophical outlooks that are shaped by their devotion to particular forms of metal music and adapted to cultural conditions in Iran. Alongside these hardcore fans, considerable numbers of Iranians follow the fashions of metal culture. This paper examines the reasons for the popularity of metal in some sections of Iran's population and analyses this popularity in the context of Iran's recent cultural history and gender relations. It argues that aspects of metal culture that appeal to many fans in Iran include a distaste for religious institutions, the articulation of anger about perceived injustice, hypocrisy and ignorance, and the empathy of fellow fans who live with feelings of isolation, difference, and not being understood by families or mainstream society. These aspects of metal culture cross genders, but the ways they are experienced by individual fans are conditioned by the particular gender divisions of contemporary Iran, some of which differ from those of other metal contexts. Metal music conventionally features simple, explicit lyrics, performed with flamboyance and often with elaborate stage shows that may be read as masculinist. For many fans in Iran, this music serves to resolve personal conflicts, such as paradoxical desires for both outsider and insider status, and for acceptable modes of individualism and collectivity. Some fans claim that metal communities represent an appealing alternative to the central role of family in Iranian culture, as members loyally take care of each other in a world seen as hostile. Other fans draw on certain genres or examples of metal music to support a range of views, such as those relating to nationalism, alternative religious practices or different approaches to gender relations. This paper analyses the roles of gender in each of these responses to metal music in Iran. It is co-presented by a cultural historian who has conducted extensive fieldwork in Iran and an Iran-based metal guitarist and devotee.