Music as sexual violence? Investigating the case of bar/club-based sex trafficking and sonic harm

Abstract

ABSTRACT Accounts of human trafficking suggest music’s uniquely insidious role for victims forcibly trafficked into strip club-based sex work, wherein music is ubiquitous. In sociological fieldwork, sex workers and trafficking victims testify to various effects of musical sound: against their will, the onset of music commands bodies to perform erotic dance, and songs’ formal and rhythmic features compel forms of movement. In situations of strip club-based trafficking, events of musicalsound therefore amount to coercion – itself defined as a form of sexual violence by the World Health Organization. Comprehending structures of trafficking victims’ abjection requires communicative,semiotic understandings of coercion’s mechanisms, and must resist conflating violence andphysical materiality. Building on J. L. Austin’s theorization of how verbal utterances perform certain kinds of semiotic actions, I argue that musical sound can behave like certain assaultive and coercive speech acts: acts of signaling that command sexual performances from trafficking victims within gross power asymmetries. A discourse analysis of the public forum online “The Ultimate Strip Club List” (TUSCL), which hosts discussions amongst both sex workers and patrons of strip clubs, suggests situations where the entanglement of sound and materiality loses explanatory and emancipatory power to critique music’s injurious capacities.