Heavy Metal and Disability, Volume II: Blessed are the Sick

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Heavy Metal and Disability, Volume II: Blessed are the Sick

Co-Editors: Jasmine Hazel Shadrack and Keith Kahn-Harris.

Call for Papers:

Trauma and disability are [often] discussed in similar terms. Trauma results from a profoundly distressing experience—war, abuse, migration, a sudden death—and is often the focus of therapeutic efforts to heal and become “normal” again. Disability references a number of physical and mental conditions that render a body impaired or disabled, and thus not “normal.” Both trauma and disability are regarded as life-altering states that not only reconfigure the mind and body but may also impact a person’s capacity to feel pleasure, develop coping mechanisms, and interact with the world. (Storti, A., 2021)

Our volume, Heavy Metal and Disability: Crips, Crowds, and Cacophonies (Intellect, 2024) was intended to be the start of an important conversation on the myriad ways in which metal music and its culture intersects with various ontological and epistemological experiences of disability. Yet one edited collection alone was never going to be able to do justice to the great many experiences and conversations on this topic that deserve to be heard. As Anna Storti states above, trauma and disability are regarded as life-altering states’ (ibid), so we now wish to expand and continue that conversation.

As a concept, disability intersects with a variety of other concepts, all of which are contestable, contested and also indispensable: Sickness, injury, pain, trauma cannot be disengaged from disability but nor are they reducible to it. In this volume, therefore, we encourage work that explores the ambiguities and ambivalences that arise when disability and related concepts are applied to real world cases.

Metal, of course, is a similarly contested field, with its own contested terminologies and boundaries. Indeed, metal is often seen as a culture defined by the crossing and troubling of boundaries. Therefore, in this volume we seek to encourage work that relates metal’s boundary-crossing with the boundaries of disability and ability, sickness and health, pain and comfort, and so on. Above all, we encourage perspectives that centre the body in understanding metal culture – and the limits of the contested metal body.

This call for papers invites abstracts on the following areas of metal music studies and disability studies:

  • The ways in which physical disabilities intersect with metal music and its culture, whether innate* or acquired
  • The ways in which sensory disabilities intersect with metal music and its culture, whether innate or acquired
  • The ways in which co-occurring diagnoses impact engagement with metal music and its culture

* We use the term innate specifically to mean ‘born with’ and to replace the medical model of disability’s language of ‘congenital’. We feel that ‘congenital’ has connotations imposed upon it from the medical profession (top-down power differential), rather than a disability activist position (bottom-up maneuverability and reclamation). Unfortunately, there is a paucity of good faith terminology regarding disability and to couch against this, we have chosen ‘innate’ as a more loving language replacement. 

  • Differentiated engagements with metal music and its culture in relation to:
  • Sickness
  • Injury
  • Performing/touring/participating whilst sick/disabled
  • Exhaustion/Fatigue
  • Pain
  • Listening/Hearing
  • Seeing
  • Participating
  • The ways in which age-related diagnoses intersect with metal music and its culture
  • The ways in which engagement with either/or metal lyrics and music speak of and to disability
  • The ways in which the following intersect with metal music and its culture:
  • Fat Studies
  • Identity Studies
  • Trauma Studies
  • Disability/Crips Studies
  • Death Studies
  • Grief Studies

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to both jasmine.shadrack@uwo.ca and keith@kahn-harris.org by 1st September 2026.

Bibliography

Storti, A., M., M. (2021). ‘Abuse and/as disability in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Dirty River’ in Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media, edited by Michael S. Jeffress, London: Taylor & Francis Group.