Prize Year
2023
Document Type
Unrestricted
Abstract
Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss is Jasmine Shadrack’s performance autoethnography—in this, she explains her experiences and the sociocultural phenomena that shaped them through the lens of her black metal career. She focuses on her role as guitarist and frontwoman of black metal band Denigrata. Shadrack’s onstage persona is Denigrata Herself, which allows her to experiment with her gender presentation and portray aspects of her trauma and disabilities in a way she is comfortable with. As the pain from her complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and fibromyalgia increased, Shadrack eventually had to leave Denigrata.
Due to her connection to Denigrata Herself, she continued to create black metal inspired photography dressed as her persona. Through doing this, she found a way to continue expressing both gender and disability in a way that felt most authentic to her. Discovering this was a long and arduous process, made ever more difficult due to holding two socially devalued states. Due to society's failure to acknowledge disabled experiences, disabled people exist outside of the demands of 'femininity' and 'masculinity'—thus, disabled people cannot fully find a place within socially constructed gender roles, leading to both internal and external conflicts and a fundamentally different experience embodying gender.
Instructor/Course
R Hu, CWP 114 Writing Identity
Recommended Citation
Marr, Dorian, "The Disabled Lens: Viewing Gender Performance" (2023). Dean James E. McLeod Freshman Writing Prize. 22.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mcleod/22