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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• human trafficking
• sexual violence
• sonic violence
• speech act theory

Disclosure statement

I have no financial interest arising from direct applications of this research.

Notes

1. E.g. Brauer (2016), Cusick (2013), Cusick (2008a), Cusick (2008b), Cusick (2006), Daughtry (2014), Goodman (2010), Papaeti and Grant (2013a), Papaeti and Grant (2013b), Parker (2019), Parker (2018).

2. As Parker (2019) finds, the use of music in “enhanced interrogation” is not currently and is not likely to be recognised as a form of torture that contravenes the Geneva Convention’s prohibitions.

3. Interpellation, a concept from the work of Louis Althusser (Althusser [1971] 2001), describes the process in which individuals’ identities come into being by getting positioned as subjects of ideological systems. Its basic mechanism is that a subject is “hailed” and gets configured as the addressee of that call by virtue of responding to it, effectively consenting to a naming of the self under the ideological terms specified by the entity, institution, or power who “hails” the subject.

4. Arbeeguy, Message posted to: [“Happy Dancers a Prerequisite?”], in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 8 December 2008, https://www.tuscl.net/postread.php?PID=9406.

5. Picaresque, Message posted to: [“DJ rant … advice appreciated”], in Stripper Web discussion forum, 25 October 2006, https://www.stripperweb.com/forum/showthread.php?75840-DJ-rant-advice-appreciated.

6. It is estimated (Taneeru 2011) that between 10 and 30 million individuals worldwide are victims of human trafficking, though some experts consider this to be a low estimate. The International Labour Office (2017) estimates that at least one out of every nine victims of modern-day slavery (including labour-trafficking and forced marriage) are sold for sexual exploitation, and that as many as 4.8 million individuals worldwide are victims of sex-trafficking. Prosecution lags far behind these numbers. According to figures collected by the U.S. Department of State (2010), in 2010, 42,291 victims of human trafficking were identified worldwide, but of that number only 7,909 cases were prosecuted, resulting in only 3,969 convictions.

7. Acts of coercion also, of course, in many cases prepare and facilitate physical forms of violence and precarity. As one victim testimony published by the BBC and written by Shandra Woworuntu, a member of the U.S. Advisory Council who was lured into forced prostitution with the false promise of a job in the hospitality sector, discloses: “traffickers made me take drugs at gunpoint … The traffickers only fed me plain rice soup with a few pickles, and I was often high on drugs. The constant threat of violence, and the need to stay on high alert, was also very exhausting” (Woworuntu 2016).

8. That said, the TUSCL forum is unlikely to be closely proportionally representative of the overall demographics of strip clubs in the United States. The very activity of discussing strip club work or patronage on a web forum is unlikely to be demographically neutral, though this matter is beyond the scope of this study.

9. “Rachel’s Story,” http://iamatreasure.com/stories/rachels-story/.

10. Ibid.

11. In this effort, I am attempting to channel an ethical turn in the post-Austinian development of speech-act theory that I identify in two particular streams of thought. First, critical race theorists, such as Richard Delgado (1982) and Matsuda et al. (1993), working in contexts of legal scholarship, have argued for legislation to combat hate speech and slurs by appealing to performative notions of language-as-conduct. Second, some literature in the anti-porn activism of the late 1990s and early 2000s (e.g. MacKinnon 1996; Langton 1993) emphasises a critique of pornography based on rejecting the premise that it is merely a form of speech and expression (legally speaking), and that it possesses actional efficacy to silence women, and to limit their own ability to make speech-acts and linguistically enact their sexual agency. For a critical assessment of this literature, see Bauer (2015).

12. kinkychloe, Message posted to: [“Advice to Dancers: let the Music Be Your Charm”] in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 11 October 2011, https://www.tuscl.net/article.php5?id=16636.

13. Ibid.

14. CTQWERTY, Message posted to: [“Advice to Dancers: let the Music Be Your Charm”] in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 12 October 2011, https://www.tuscl.net/article.php5?id=16636.

15. wallanon, message posted to: [“TUSCL Strip Club Music Hall Of Fame – 2017 Nominees List”] in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 7 May 2017, https://tuscl.net/article.php?id=49523.

16. User shadowcat writes: “Just once I would like to see and hear a dancer dance to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. I’d be willing to tip a dancer on stage $10 to try just a short version”. shadowcat, message posted to: [“Dancers’ Music”] in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 28 April 2018, https://www.tuscl.net/discussion.php5?id=56628.

17. There are many dimensions to the discussion of specific musical features on the TUSCL forums which could be unpacked, most notable, perhaps, being users’ notions of sonic colour lines and the racialisation of various genres of music along with the racialisation of sex work, but such a discussion far exceeds the purview of this study.

18. mmdv26, Message posted to: [“Ever get a lapdance without music?”], in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 10 October 2010, https://www.tuscl.net/postread.php?PID=13503.

19. Roadworrier, Message posted to: [“Mons Venus”], in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 7 November 2016, https://www.tuscl.net/rev.php?M=A&RID=288591.

20. samsung 1, Message posted to: [“Ever get a lapdance without music?”], in The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion forum, 3 October 2010, https://www.tuscl.net/postread.php?PID=13503.

Additional information

Funding

Parts of the period during which this work was completed were supported by a dissertation writing grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and by funding from a Yale University Dissertation Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Andrew J. Chung

Andrew J. Chung (PhD, Yale University) is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of North Texas College of Music. His work specialises in questions of musical meaning and the music-language metaphor, and connections between contemporary music, its aesthetic and ethical questions, and continental philosophy. He is especially interested in the ethics and political potentials of musical sound, with their entanglements in semiotic, decolonial, and ecological thought.