Laina Dawes

Laina Dawes is a Canadian music journalist and cultural critic whose work examines race, gender, and participation in heavy music. What Are You Doing Here?, published by Bazillion Points in 2013, combines memoir, reporting, and interviews to document Black women as musicians and listeners in metal, punk, and hardcore scenes. Skin, the vocalist of Skunk Anansie, contributes the foreword. Dawes places her own experiences beside testimony from performers and fans, showing that musical communities described as outsiders can still reproduce exclusions found in wider culture. Her subject is not simply visibility onstage: she also considers touring, audience behavior, genre expectations, and the practical work of claiming space in scenes where Black women are often treated as exceptions. Dawes developed the project through journalism and kept it closely connected to the voices of the people she interviewed. Its blend of personal narrative and cultural history gives it a distinct role in writing about metal beyond conventional band biography or record criticism.