Dawes — What Are You Doing Here?

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)

What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal is a book by the Canadian music critic Laina Dawes, published by Bazillion Points with a foreword by Skin of Skunk Anansie. Its publisher describes it as an investigation of how Black women musicians and fans navigate metal, hardcore and punk, genres thought of as inclusive that fail to block out the race and gender issues of the world outside. Its evidence is Dawes’s own experience, the stories of other Black women in those scenes and a survey printed as an appendix, and Dawes has described being harassed at metal shows and having her taste questioned by Black friends and their parents. Publishers Weekly called it “thoughtful and inspiring,” PopMatters called it essential reading, and in 2025 the journal Metal Music Studies published Catherine Hoad’s retrospective of it in its tenth-anniversary issue.

Bazillion Points published the book with a foreword by Skin, the singer of Skunk Anansie; Goodreads dates its first publication to November 2012, and its Wikipedia article to January 2013.¹ Dawes, a music and cultural critic raised in Ontario and later a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University, wrote that she wanted to find other Black women who were “rabid about the music and culture and adamant about asserting their rightful place as black women within those scenes,” and that she found many and shared their stories.² The publisher describes the book as an investigation of how Black women navigate metal, hardcore and punk, genres thought of as inclusive and centered on community that fail to block out the race and gender issues of the outside world.² Its chapters include “I’m Here Because We Started It!,” “So You Think You’re White?,” “‘The Only One’ Syndrome” and “The Lingering Stench of Racism in Metal,” and its appendix prints the survey Dawes conducted.²

In an interview with NPR in January 2013, Dawes said she had been verbally harassed at metal shows and told she was not welcome. She said that, as a teenager, Black friends and their parents had questioned her cultural legitimacy as a Black person for wearing a Def Leppard T-shirt, and that the resistance to who should listen to which genre according to gender and ethnicity made no sense to her.³

Publishers Weekly called the book “thoughtful and inspiring,” and PopMatters called it “essential reading” both for readers who had never met intolerance and for those who had met it often.⁴ In 2025 the tenth-anniversary issue of Metal Music Studies included Hoad’s retrospective of it, alongside retrospectives of Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal (1991), Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil (1993) and Ian Christe’s Sound of the Beast (2003).⁵

Key contributions

• An account of Black women in metal, hardcore and punk, built from the author’s experience, the stories of other women and a survey.
• The pressure on Black women fans from the scenes, where Dawes was harassed and told she was unwelcome, and from Black friends and families who questioned their taste.
• The argument, in the publisher’s description, that scenes thought of as inclusive carry the race and gender issues of the world outside.