No mosh pit was set up in the Bowen Thompson Studio Union for Laina Dawes’s keynote talk at the heavy metal conference Saturay.
Instead the writer and photographer spoke at a podium next to a couple tables with microphones. And her talk, “Race, Gender and Authenticity in Extreme Music,” was about extending the notion of what people think about heavy metal.
Dawes was at Bowling Green State University as part of for the conference “Heavy Metal Rules the World,” which drew dozens of scholars to campus.
Dawes grew up in a small town in Ontario as the adopted black daughter of a white family. As a black Canadian, she was expected to like music associated with the African diaspora, reggae and calypso and the like.