The didactic role of feminist art in metal music: Coven bands as a relational device for personal improvement and social justice

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the feminist artistic practices that some bands are adopting through metal music to show how their approaches are linked to a tradition in the history of feminist art. For this purpose, I addressed these feminist metal bands to demonstrate how their practices align with feminist and artistic pedagogies that evolved during the 1970s women’s liberation movement. I examine how artists, like second-wave feminist art groups, create an integrating framework that transcends the scope of art, managing to simultaneously convene and attend to various personal and social processes, based on a reflection substantiated on social group theory, feminist art, feminist pedagogies and ritual studies. Similarly, I highlight and differentiate their specific strategies by analysing their practices in order to understand, on the one hand, these feminist bands as a powerful relational device, which I have termed ‘coven bands’, and, on the other hand, the set of their practices as a didactic action of feminist resistance for personal improvement and social justice. Therefore, I will show how coven bands – whose name is a metaphor that evokes a gathering or circle of witches – are both a collective critical conscience and a multifunctional platform where several of life’s processes can be conjured up, such as relational learning, mutual help, psycho-emotional healing, creativity, empowerment and social action simultaneously.