Enseñar a transgredir: Metal feminista, a través de la investigación-acción participativa, como herramienta artística de liberación y pedagógica en el aula

Abstract

This dissertation presents, first, an in-depth perusal of feminist artistic manifestations in metal music and culture from a transdisciplinary and multidimensional approach. In this sense, the text offers an exhaustive critic analysis of the diverse discourses, relational processes, and bodily practices of feminist metal in different contexts of the Global North and South from an intersectional, psycho-sociological, and pedagogical feminist approach. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews conducted with 21 feminist metal bands from different countries, 32 song lyrics and 19 album covers. As well as other complementary sources, such as promotional images, statements of the bands in the media, promotional websites/profiles, and personal profiles of the artists in social networks. Likewise, this dissertation, enters conversation with the broader field of the arts —in a comparative way— offering an identification of the links and distances of feminist metal with feminist art of the 1970s. On the other hand, it delineates a didactic pattern observable in extreme feminist metal music, which allows its conceptualization as a liberatory praxis and, finally, as a bastard exercise in socioritual a/r/t/ography. Secondly, the text explains the development of an international participatory action-research (AR) project with the feminist metal community. The AR — developed in virtual environments by a group of 36 people (artists, activists, and academics) from the metal scenes— offers a social diagnosis of the gender barriers that affect participation in the different metal scenes in contexts of the Global North and South. This social diagnosis is based on a panoramic literature review and a global survey in which 32 countries participated. At the same time, the AR project has generated several products aimed at community intervention/dissemination of the information obtained. Thus, this thesis offers the following: a collective article, a web page, a video-spell in line with the symbolic strategies of feminist metal, and the series of explanatory videos Don't Touch My Amp. All in all, the design of the AR project has succeeded in rigorously informing the contextual key to the study phenomenon object of this dissertation —feminist metal— while contributing to the interests of the subjects and community of study. Finally, this dissertation shows the development of a pilot experience in the educational field, which aimed to explore the potential of the identified feminist metal art strategies and techniques as tools within the framework of restorative feminist pedagogies. Therefore, this study contributes to the understanding of feminist artisticpolitical expressions within the specialized field of metal studies, and feminist art in a broader sense. It has also served to advance feminist claims in the metal scenes, permeating the boundaries of academic research —particularly within the field of metal— through a methodological approach socially committed. It also contributes to feminist restorative pedagogies by exploring an innovative didactic formula focused on using new tools and techniques. In a broader sense and lastly, this study contributes to the utopian enterprise of the so-called ecology of knowledge —based on the interaction of scientific practices, subalternized artistic practices and embodied knowledge— as a source of valuable knowledge, which activates an interconnected scientific thought, following Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010, pp. 52-53).