Author: Laina Dawes
Title: What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal
Year: 2012
Type: Book (Bazillion Points)
The title is a question the author kept getting asked at shows. Dawes, a Canadian critic and ethnomusicologist, answers it with a book that is part memoir and part interview corpus — Black women musicians and fans across metal, hardcore, and punk — billed by its publisher as the first general-interest book to put race, gender, and identity in those scenes at the center.1 The argument cuts two ways at once. Metal’s roots run through Black music, so the door was never anyone else’s to guard; and the policing comes from both sides, white scene peers questioning her presence and Black communities questioning her taste — a double bind the book documents from the inside.2 NPR’s interview at publication caught the stakes in its title: “The Life and Liberation of a Black Female Metal Fan.”3
The reception made it the corrective on record. PopMatters filed it as essential; Publishers Weekly called it “thoughtful and inspiring,” and within a decade the field had canonized it: Catherine Hoad wrote its retrospective for the same 2025 issue of Metal Music Studies that honored the founding scholarship — the corrective now sits in the canon it corrects.4 The publishing lineage sharpens the point. Bazillion Points is Ian Christe’s imprint, so the press behind the genre’s standard survey issued the book that answers the gap the survey’s own reviewers had named.5
It is the answer to three named critiques at once. Burton faulted [[Christe - Sound of the Beast|Sound of the Beast]] for its thin treatment of metal’s racial demographics; the field’s own reviewers judged Weinstein’s gender frameworks dated; and Walser’s “exscription” named the erasure from the outside, without hearing from the erased.6 Dawes supplies what all three lack: the testimony. The book’s people are the proud pariahs’ pariahs — fans who love the music at full volume while it questions their right to the room — and the family’s history, told without them, is incomplete.7
Key contributions
- The first general-interest book on race, gender, and identity in metal, hardcore, and punk, by its publisher’s account.
- The double-policing analysis: exclusion from white scene peers and skepticism from Black communities, documented from inside both.
- The testimony the founding texts lack: the women exscription erased, on the record in their own words.
- Field-canonized within a decade: its own retrospective alongside the founding scholarship in Metal Music Studies’ 2025 issue.
See also
- Heavy Metal — the founding sociology this book audits from inside the room
- Running with the Devil — “exscription” named the erasure; Dawes interviews the erased
- Sound of the Beast — the standard survey whose reviewers asked where race was; same imprint, answer supplied
- Metal — the family whose who-counts debate runs on this book
Footnotes
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The Bazillion Points edition page (accessed July 14, 2026) — 208 pages; the first-book framing is the publisher’s trade description, carried in New Books Network’s coverage. The publisher’s catalog implies 2013; Goodreads and the January 2013 NPR coverage of the just-released book date it 2012, cited here. ↩
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The double-policing account per NPR’s interview with Dawes, January 4, 2013 and the publisher’s description (both accessed July 14, 2026). ↩
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NPR, January 4, 2013 (accessed July 14, 2026). ↩
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The PopMatters and Publishers Weekly verdicts per the Bazillion Points edition page; Catherine Hoad’s retrospective per the Metal Music Studies 11.1 special-issue contents (both accessed July 14, 2026). ↩
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The imprint per Bazillion Points (accessed July 14, 2026); Burton’s race critique of the survey is documented in Sound of the Beast’s note. ↩
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The three critiques are documented, with citations, in the three books’ own notes. ↩
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Dawes’s Columbia ethnomusicology candidacy and critical work per the Bazillion Points author bio and her Hazlitt author page (both accessed July 14, 2026). ↩
