Hysteric Desire: Sexual Positions, Sonic Subjectivity and Gender Play in Glam Metal
In: Can I Play with Madness? Metal, Dissonance, Madness and AlienationSearch for other papers by Kristen Sollee in
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From its inception, the genre of glam metal has been defined by gender-bending imagery paradoxically paired with lyrics soaked in sex-obsessed misogyny. Jacques Lacan’s 1955-56 Seminar posits hysteria as a neurosis that reveals the structure of desire and concerns the question of the subject’s sexual position, which he poses as ‘Am I a man or am I a woman?’ While stereotypically feminine signifiers are more glaringly incorporated into the visual aspects of the genre, shifting gender identifications are also audible through sonic means via vocal timbre. Thus, glam metal provides a stage upon which the disorienting effects of gender dysphoric and euphoric behaviour can be performed by male musicians, particularly through the fusion of feminine vocal timbres, heteronormative sexual aggression and the fashionable appropriation of a feminine aesthetic. Working with musical material and critical theory texts such as Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, the intersection of ‘the male’, ‘the female’, madness and desire in the genre of glam metal will be analysed from a Lacanian perspective.