Heavy Music Mothers - (Extreme Sounds Studies: Global Socio-Cultural Explorations) by Julie Turley & Joan Jocson-Singh (Paperback)

About the Book

Heavy Music Mothers explores how women navigate and disrupt narratives of motherhood within the male-dominated world of heavy music, blending memoir and autoethnography to illuminate the powerful, complex identities of musicking mothers.

Book Synopsis

Heavy Music Mothers: Extreme Identities, Narrative Disruptions is an exploration of women and heavy music and the ways in which women have historically engaged with musicking as mothers. Julie Turley and Joan Jocson-Singh, musicking mothers themselves, largely employ an ethnographic lens, foregrounded in powerful one-on-one original interviews as vignettes that narrate thematic patterns. Other chapters examine motherhood identity embedded in respective published rock music memoirs, discussions of rock performance as a site of maternal bonding, and themes that arise when heavy music mothers write about motherhood. Autoethnographic portions throughout give the book an intimate and personal tone: one such chapter presents the concept of vigilante motherhood within an auto-ethnographic context. The authors reference the book's limitations, meditating on historically marginalized moms the authors predict and hope the focus will be on for the future. Heavy Music Mothers is a robust study of women and motherhood set within a music culture historically inhospitable to both women and mothers. This book, the first scholarly study of this topic, is just the beginning.

Review Quotes

"Heavy Music Mothers is a celebration and a critique, challenging essen-tialist narratives of who gets to rock and who gets to mother while offering a roadmap for those who seek to do both ... The authors' honest acknowledgement of imperfection underscores the book's nuanced and empathetic portrait of mothers navigating extreme identities." --Metal Music Studies

"Turley and Jocson-Singh's focus on motherhood sets this work apart. Heavy Music Mothers is engaging, unique, well-researched, and an important contribution to the literature concerned with music and gender and how women navigate these traditionally male-dominated spaces." --Stacy Russo, author of We Were Going to Change the World: Interviews with Women from the 1970s and 1980s Southern California Punk Rock Scene

"Heavy Music Mothers by Julie Turley and Joan Jocson-Singh offers a brave and important look into what it takes to make extreme music while mothering-and highlights the structural and social barriers that get in the way. These mothers' stories are raw, vulnerable, harrowing, and beautiful, just like the music they make. Heavy Music Mothers will change the way you understand metal, punk, and motherhood." --Beth Winegarner, author of Tenacity: Heavy Metal in the Middle East and Africa

About the Author

Julie Turley is assistant professor and open education librarian at Kingsborough Community College/City University of New York in Brooklyn.
Joan Jocson-Singh is library director at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, CA.