Rosemary Overell

Brutal belonging in Melbourne's grindcore scene

I suggest sociality depends on affective encounters between individuals in particular spaces. Through an ethnography of Melbournes grindcore death-metal scene, I examine how belonging in a music scene is constituted by scene members’ affective encounters. In particular, I suggest that a “brutal” disposition is necessary for cultivating the affective intensities necessary for experiencing belonging in the scene. Using scene members’ own understandings of “brutal” I shift from iconic representations of “brutality,” common in other metal scenes, toward a brutal affect. Here, brutality is experienced as a set of embodied intensities, difficult to articulate, but crucial to understanding how scene members cultivate belonging – in the grindcore scene, and in scenic spaces.

The Pink Palace, policy and power: Home-making practices and gentrification in Northcote

Cultural practices constitute cultural spaces, which include, or exclude, specific identities. This article examines a set of particular ‘home-making’ cultural practices surrounding gentrification in Northcote, Melbourne. I use the notion of home making to understand the implications of gentrification on a particular site, the Pink Palace. The Pink Palace was a former warehouse, located on Eastment Street, Northcote, which operated as a home, a punk music venue and a space for radical political activism between 1998 and 2005. It was closed in 2005 when the lease was not renewed. Through ethnographic interviews I conducted with people involved at the Pink Palace, I understand the punk subcultural activities practised as instances of home making which attempted to fix a meaning for the Pink Palace and its surrounds. I posit this articulation of home making against the home-making practices of Darebin City Council, which attempted to re-signify Eastment Street as a ‘creative community’ through cultural planning. An analysis of Darebin City Councils policies shows how such policy constructs the Pink Palace and its nearby area as the home space of a creative-consumer identity. The creative consumer is a gentrifying identity whose home-making practices enacted the creative community imperatives laid out by Darebin City Council. The home-making practices of the gentrifying creative consumer worked to over-determine the punk home space constituted through the (sub)cultural practices of the Pink Palace residents. The punk significance of Eastment Street was invisibilized as the practices of home making by gentrifiers gained ascendance. With the gentrification of the space, the Pink Palace residents no longer felt ‘at home’ in Eastment Street. They were excluded from their former home space and the Pink Palace closed.

Introduction: Orienting Feminism: Media, Activism, and Cultural Representation

This chapter situates Orienting Feminism in contemporary feminist engagements with media, activism, and cultural representations. Alongside an outline of the book, Dale and Overell examine what feminism means and how it operates in the contemporary moment. They regard feminism as circulatory, as a movement that does not sit still and so can never be fully placed or fixed, which makes it compatible with the idea of orientation. Thinking about feminism’s ongoing self-critique, this chapter treats the feminist impulse as an orientation—a tending-towards a future without patriarchy. In this book, the authors ask how feminism orients our responses to cultural events, happenings, and representations in recent times. Dale and Overell situate the feminist chapters in the book as provocations for readers that offer a glimpse of the many lively sites of feminism today.

Queer will: hikikomori as willful subjects

ABSTRACT This article considers hikikomori as willful subjects. The hikikomori are a portion of the Japanese population who withdraw into their homes. These are mostly young people (between the ages of 15 and 35) and mostly young men. The focus of this article is how hikikomori constitute a challenge to dominant national imaginaries of Japan as a “corporate-family system.” This article analyses popular media and psychiatric representations of hikikomori, particularly from Saitô’s work as exemplifying Ahmed’s notion of “willful subjects.” It is argued that the hikikomori’s apparent willfulness produces them as Queer subjects who are out of place and pace with the dominant heteronormative, masculinist culture of contemporary Japan.

Introduction: Affective Intensities and Brutal Belonging

Whether in Melbourne, New York, Birmingham or Osaka, the word ‘brutal’ is an integral part of extreme metal music fans’ vocabulary. It features in band names and generic demarcations. But it is most commonly used as an adjective, to describe the intense experience of listening to grindcore music.

Brutal Belonging in Brutal Spaces

This chapter is about grindcore spaces — the pubs and raibuhausu — that host both cities grindcore scenes. Brutal belonging is less about material places than the abstract intensities of feeling, or affect, generated through participation in grindcore music. To describe these sites of affective belonging, I use Thrift’s (2008) notion of ‘affective spaces’. That is, an ephemeral constitution of a meaningful site, produced through inter-subjective and inter-objective human practices, which generate affect.

Brutal Belonging in Other Spaces

So far, I have compared how scene members constitute and experience brutal belonging, spatially and socially, in Melbourne and Osaka. Despite cultural differences, both Melbournian and Osakan grindcore fans feel ‘at home’ in their local grindcore brutal spaces, because of their experience of brutal belonging, generated by the affective intensity of grindcore music and brutal sociality. In this chapter, I look at the relatively recent interaction between both cities and how scene members negotiate brutal belonging in spaces away from home.

Idiots and Wankers: Grindcore Sociality

In this chapter, I turn to brutal social relations, which occur in brutal spaces and enable, or constrain belonging. In short, I look at how scene members enact, and experience, brutal belonging socially. The experience of being in a grindcore space during a live performance is affective and fosters belonging for scene members. However, with this belonging comes a process of designating those who do not belong in the scene. Here, I will discuss scene members’ experiences of belonging to the grindcore scene and how this works in relation to other scenes and, in Japan’s case, dominant modes of national belonging.

A Grisly Scene? Extreme Metal Music, Belonging and Ethnography

Extreme metal music is often dismissed in popular culture as violent, misogynist and dangerous. However, it still draws fans. In this chapter, I explore how I came to grindcore music, and how this book is a highly personal attempt to reconcile the contradictions outlined above.

I Hate Girls and Emotions: Brutal Sociality and Gender

Brutal sociality in grindcore concerns gendered power relations. There is a recurrent assumption that Western metal is sexist, masculinist and even misogynist (Arnett, 1996; Kahn-Harris, 2007; Walser, 1993; Weinstein, 2000 [1991]). Metal signifiers, often literally, scream masculinity, or even misogyny.