8. From Rumours to Calling Out: Denunciations of Gender-Based Violence in Electronic Dance Music in France

Alice Laurent-Camena

©2025 Alice Laurent-Camena, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0436.08

The complexity here is—and I think it’s not just related to sexual violence—it’s an environment where everything is brushed under the rug.1

Thomas (DJ and music producer, aged thirty-four—2023)2

I tell myself that at some point it’s going to calm down but obviously it’s not. It’s... hell. Every week something new comes out.

Marc (DJ and artistic director, aged thirty-five—2022)

How can these two artists, both relatively well established in the networks of cooperation of the French electronic ‘art world’ (Becker, 1982), make such contradictory statements relative to denunciations of gender-based violence? During extensive fieldwork in France, this tension emerged time and again. During our conversation, Thomas used the word ‘omerta’ to describe the situation, a term originally associated with a code of silence in secret societies. Marc instead described the frequency with which he heard reports of violent colleagues as a ‘hecatomb’. Such a label is symbolically charged. It conveys the idea of numerous acts of violence committed by fellow artists, but also the idea that the thereby denounced artists face a dramatic ending (to their careers, in our case). I found myself constantly caught between two empirical observations: abusers in this art world are denounced in the name of gender equality, but testimonies of violence are concurrently silenced. I explore this seemingly paradoxical tension, which, upon deeper analysis, reveals the ambivalence of social change regarding gender relations.

On the one hand, this social world is rife with gender-based violence, which, following Liz Kelly’s conceptualisation (1987), can be analysed as part of a continuum. My research reveals that female and LGBTQ artists are very likely to encounter violence throughout their careers. These violent experiences span a variety of contexts, all linked to the interviewees’ activities as DJs: as frequent partygoers, in their day-to-day professional activities and in conjugal relationships with other members of the scene.3 The concept of ‘gender-based violence’—contrary to the phrasing ‘sexist and sexual violence’ that prevails in the art world—enables us to conceive violence as rooted in gender relations and as exacerbated manifestations of gender inequalities (Brown et al., 2020). That is, these forms of violence should be understood not as isolated incidents but as elements reminding individuals of the hierarchical and dichotomous ‘gender order’ (Connell, 1987) in place, as well as ordinary forms of practice of this order enabling its maintain.

On the other hand, fighting gender-based violence is a major political theme in the French electronic music world. Since the transnational #MeToo movement,4 several cases have emerged within this professional space. As documented in the previous chapters of this book, media coverage is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gender-based violence and its embedment in specific social contexts. The most widely publicised case concerning the French electronic music world broke in May 2020. The four denounced members of the Parisian collective Qui Embrouille Qui saw their careers come to an abrupt halt despite their central positions in the artistic networks of the time. Yet, how can this environment, a male-dominated professional world operating around informal networks and reputations, be the site of denunciations that ‘work’? That is, of denunciations leading to sanctioning—by exclusion—of the alleged authors of violence? This chapter seeks to answer this question.

In addressing denunciation as a sociological object, I draw on the work of Luc Boltanski et al. (1984), who situate the latter as social process on a continuum between the denunciation of an individual and the denunciation of an injustice (here, gender-based violence as a whole). According to this theoretical framework, a denunciation corresponds to a ‘system of places’ bringing into play a whistle-blower (or denunciator), a victim, an accused, and a recipient (e.g., the public) of the denunciation who judges what has been reported. In this ‘actancial system,’ a denunciation can only be received as normal and valid—from a sociological perspective—if it leads to a ‘generalisation’ process. To be considered rightful, claims and testimonies must be linked to values shared by the public. As set forth by Boltanski, the social positioning of the different actors distributed in this system of places has some importance, though is far from the only determinant of the success of a given denunciation.5 The French electronic music world offers a heuristic case to explore the effects of denunciations of a specific gendered form of injustice, and what these effects tell us about the gendered organisation of a given social world.

The art world under consideration here is relatively homogeneous as far as the denunciation of violence as a gender-based form of injustice is concerned. ‘Sexist and sexual’ forms of violence are described in exactly these terms, in ordinary discourse as well as in official statements, and are widely considered a social problem. This is, firstly, because overall sensitivity to violence has changed over the last decade in the French context (Brown et al., 2020)—a sensitivity that has continued to evolve in the wake of the #MeToo movement (Cavalin et al., 2022). Secondly, this art world, though still largely male-dominated, is widely touched by the spreading of egalitarian norms in the workplace (Bereni & Jacquemart, 2018). With regard to gender-based violence, these norms manifest in multiple ethical charters aimed at preventing the occurrence of violence in party spaces. Meanwhile, norms related to gender equality are expressed through the art world’s ‘egalitarian ethos’, a concept Isabelle Clair (2011, p. 80) employs to describe how an ideal of gender equality spreads in ordinary practices, while at the same time reaffirming the idea of differentiation and ‘complementarity between sexes’. 6 Here, I use this egalitarian ethos as a tool to investigate how the ‘professional ethos’ of individuals involved in the art world is enriched by this dimension, conveying the general idea of an environment ‘naturally’ sensitive to social inequalities,7 though without fundamentally disturbing its gendered organisation.

In order to go beneath the ‘egalitarian surface coating’8 (Cavalin et al., 2022) of denunciations of violence in a general sense, it is useful to thoroughly analyse the different practices of denunciation at play. For, if multiple artistic groups post on social networks or display slogans in clubs such as ‘all forms of violence and discrimination are banned’, what actually happens when peers are singled out and accused of violent behaviours? I argue that public denunciations resulting in professional sanctions (i.e., exclusion from the musical scene) must necessarily be situated relative to all the other forms of denunciation that do not have this degree of social validity. I present three categories, or stages, in an itinerary of denunciations: rumour, internal denunciation and eventually public denunciation—or what interviewees referred to as ‘calling out’. At each stage, a set of obstacles tends to delegitimise the claims in question.

This study is based on three years of ethnographic immersion from 2020 to 2023 among eighty electronic musicians (between the ages of twenty-three and fifty-four) in five different French cities. In addition to shadowing them in their day-to-day professional activities, I carried out in-depth interviews with fifty-one of them, chosen in light of the artistic networks I progressively identified during fieldwork. Of these interviewees, twenty-six identify as male and twenty-five as female, all of them cisgender at the time of the study.10 During interviews, I did not directly ask about gender-based violence, with the exception of a single and broadly formulated question at the end of our conversation. The goal of this strategy was to leave space to assess who speaks about violence, how and when.

A first probable consequence of this approach is that the (already numerous) accounts of violence reported are potentially underestimated. Nonetheless, it allows us to inductively construct (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) the question of denunciation as a sociological object. A first empirical clue was the fact that most women spoke of experiences of violence that they (or some of their close colleagues) had experienced during their careers. Meanwhile, the discourse of male interviewees relative to ‘sexist and sexual violence’ mostly revolved around its general condemnation, on the relaying of ‘internal rumours’11 and moral remarks on the ‘importance’ or the ‘limitations’ of calling out as a form of social justice in the art world.

With specific regard to the denunciation of gender-based violence, my analysis refers to twenty-two cases encountered during fieldwork: seven denunciations as rumours, ten internal denunciations and five public denunciations. I identified these cases during fieldwork and furthered their analysis by collecting press and public online statements, when relevant. Of these, twenty concern men accused of violence towards women and two involve women accused of violence against women.12 These cases are not meant to be representative but rather to contribute to a better understanding of denunciation processes in this art world. They are furthermore grounded on the broader empirical data I collected on the subject: artists’ testimonies of violence during interviews and ordinary discourses regarding denunciation practices, on the part of both men and women.

Sexual and Professional Reputations at Play:
The ‘Borderline Guy’13

It’s true that some behaviours are tolerated, behaviours that aren’t at all healthy. And then, there’s where you draw the line with what should be denounced, what’s really—well, what you can reproach. Because there are still people who behave—well, badly. But you don’t actually say anything to them. Because it’s a party. But in fact, they do it all the time. [...] And everyone kind of excuses it. (Dana, DJ, aged thirty—2021)

I heard multiple remarks during fieldwork similar to Dana’s thoughts on denunciation. The terms ‘omerta’ or ‘code of silence’14 were frequently evoked when reflecting on the possibility of denouncing violent behaviours attributed to colleagues. Strikingly, they are also mobilised in other artistic contexts, such as the French opera (see Chapter 2 in this book). In a literal sense, they indicate a commitment to secrecy. Yet, a certain paradoxical tension characterises denunciation as rumour: even though untold, rumours seem to be ‘everywhere’. As some interviewees put it: ‘You always hear stories—stories about borderline guys’ (Jeanne, DJ and producer, aged twenty-six), or ‘As I’m starting to know some people, I’ve started hearing stories. [About] guys still doing their job. Club promoters, festival promoters, artists, all three. Everywhere’ (Loic, DJ and producer, aged twenty-five). An attentiveness here to rumours as denunciations in and of themselves is grounded in gender studies and feminist scholarly works on gender-based violence.15 In taking these initial clues and hints seriously, the ethnographer can begin to link recurring elements to a broader pattern—the continuum that denunciations of gender-based violence follow in a given art world.

First of all, though rumours largely concerned the sexual reputations of men, they were far from being systematically formulated in negative terms. The accused is most often categorised as someone who ‘likes to flirt’. For example, one of my interlocutors asked a member of her collective to stop working with a particular artist at an upcoming event coordinated by the group. She had witnessed his ‘sexist behaviour’ at another festival organised by peers. Her colleague argued, ‘He’s not a bad guy, he just likes to party’.16 Despite her request, the DJ in question attended the event and was assigned a shared room with a female staff member.17 Though, rumours can also have a negative connotation, where the individual in question is described as ‘borderline’ or ‘edgy’. These expressions are as recurrent as they are revealing. Here, ‘borderline’ doesn’t refer to the personality disorder but to someone whose actions are borderline permissible in a given social context. The individuals under study thus euphemistically use a term that materialises a disputed boundary between attitudes considered unsavoury but tolerated and actions considered unacceptable because socially associated with violence.

While rumours relate to the accused’s sexual reputation (not fundamentally threatened by these ‘illegitimate’ claims), the victim’s reputation also comes into play. Take, for example, Manon, a young DJ who began to play in parties in her hometown when she was eighteen. As is common in medium and large-scale French towns, she began her career by progressively becoming part of local collectives, composed mostly of older male DJs and music producers. She was sexually harassed by a member of one of these groups,18 but also experienced how men’s negative sexual reputations do not necessarily tarnish their professional reputations:

Everyone knew that the guy who said those things about me was a misogynistic bastard. And when I saw Dean [a colleague who had witnessed the harassment in question] a couple of years later, he was like ‘Ah! But everyone knew! And he’s even been charged for sexual assault’. Except that since guys always have each other’s backs, nobody voices anything when something problematic is said. When the guy was calling me a slut everywhere he went, nobody agreed with him but nobody confronted him. Everyone continued to validate his totally outrageous comments about women. (Manon, DJ, aged twenty-four—2022)

A second characteristic of denunciation as rumour concerns the caution with which accusations are relayed. By definition, rumours are only heard in informal spaces and between people who know each other sufficiently well to exchange this confidence. When two individuals are discussing a situation, the identity of the victim (who is not yet completely considered as such) is kept quiet, all the more so when there is a sociologist in the room.19 I started hearing rumours more explicitly at the end of my fieldwork, primarily during interviews. As I had carefully separated the different artistic networks I followed and studied, I was even privy to rumours denouncing some of my male interviewees.20 These circumstances—though uncomfortable at times in terms of fieldwork relations and the moral dilemmas I faced as a feminist (Clair, 2016)—were an important indicator of data saturation.

The ‘Killjoy’: Obstacles to the Social Validation of the Denunciation as Rumour

This caution in the way denunciations are passed on as rumours is tied to the different costs incurred for victims and whistleblowers. If gender-based violence is embedded in the way art worlds operate (see Chapter 7 and Chapter 2 in this book), the possibilities and modalities of denunciation are also embedded in these contexts and shaped by the constraints they impose. Here, three levels of obstacles intertwine.

Firstly, at the subjective level, speaking up against a colleague presupposes that the victim considers the offence ‘serious enough’:

Frankly, I hesitated a lot about [a promoter who harassed her by text message]. To not talk about it publicly, because nothing serious happened, I didn’t feel in danger. I wasn’t alone with him in a hotel room, you know. I didn’t experience any trauma. It’s just that… I think it’s very edgy. In my opinion, the guy must be really borderline [emphasised]. (Naomi, DJ and producer, aged twenty-six—2022)

Naomi did end up telling her closest female colleagues about her exchanges with this promoter—the denunciation then circulating in ‘preventive’ mode, much like the ‘whisper circles’ described by Bleuwenn Lechaux in the New York theatre world (Chapter 7 in this book). Notably, rumours tend to be accepted as more legitimate when they are passed on between women. For instance, an interviewee shared with her friend the attraction she felt to a fellow DJ, to which her friend responded in a confidential tone: ‘Girl, you wouldn’t believe how many skeletons he has in the closet’.

Naomi’s reservations regarding a more public form of denunciation are also linked to a second level of obstacles to denunciations. Namely, the competitive, precarious and network-based work environment characteristic of such art worlds:

And the thing is, this guy offered me [an invitation for a podcast series]. So yeah, as he’s really got some power... Of course, I could! But I mean, I would never dare snitch on him21 like that. Because the guy’s really powerful, although he’s really borderline! I mean, if he’s capable of saying stuff like that to me, what’s it like with girls he works with [on a regular basis]? Who have been with him backstage? (Naomi—2022)

One can very easily be cast aside in this endogamous and competitive world, as happens in other art spheres such as in jazz (Buscatto, 2021), opera (Chapter 2 in this book), the visual arts (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 in this book), theatre (Chapter 7 in this book) or the Japanese music industry (Chapter 3 in this book). In the French electronic music world, the main employment networks operate around the artists themselves. Indeed, most DJs are also party organisers, promoters and discographic label curators, and therefore the actual or future employers of their peers. At the same time, the hierarchical dimension of professional relationships is very implicit, reinforced by the important role of socialising and the ways in which a range of festive practices are fully integrated as professionally appropriate behaviours. To quote Sarah Thornton (1995, p. 91), electronic music artists can be analysed as ‘professional clubbers’. They are expected to consume (at least some) alcohol and to follow the temporal logic of the club, which requires them to stay in the venue and interact with peers throughout the night, intertwining work and leisure. In this context, denouncers sometimes fear being categorised as killjoys: ‘Maybe I’m the one who’s too uptight’ (Manon, DJ, aged twenty-four—2022). In this social world, the figure of the ‘feminist killjoy’, as coined by Sara Ahmed (2010), is particularly salient. Not only do these complaints go against ‘a social order, which is protected as a moral order, a happiness order’ (Ahmed, 2010, p. 2), they also go against emotional (Hochschild, 2001) and embodied forms of labour expected in certain artistic practices (see also Chapter 3; Chapter 5; and Chapter 7 in this book). In this profession, one is expected to perform playfulness and joy both when in the DJ booth and with colleagues.

A third political and moral level of obstacles can be captured through the notion of ‘egalitarian ethos’ (Clair, 2011). Given the progressive values that circulate in the electronic music world, embedded in a salient sense of community and an appropriation of feminist ideals, the denegation22 of gender-based violence is strong:

Because it’s an alternative atmosphere, because there are lots of people who are politically committed in various ways, you would think that... What should normally follow from that is more awareness and less violence. But no! Nobody can escape violence, that’s the way it is. There’s no escaping it [inhales sharply]. And the fact that we struggle to even imagine it, well… When it happens, it creates an image of what’s going on that’s just not real [emphasised]. (Maya, DJ, producer and radio show curator, aged thirty-four—2023)

Indeed, nearly all interviewees situate themselves as politically ‘leftist’ or ‘radical leftist’ and mobilise the term ‘feminist’ to define their personal and political views on gender equality. Here, a comparison with other left-wing political spaces is useful. Like in the German libertarian-left wing groups studied by Emeline Fourment, ‘The very possibility that gender-based violence can be perpetrated [in this case, by an artist against a peer] calls into question the progressive identity of the group’ (Fourment, 2017, p. 110).

Many art worlds are also spaces where people maintain not only day-to-day professional but also friendly, romantic or sexual relationships—indeed, the artistic project often absorbs most of the interviewees’ spheres of sociability (see also Chapter 4; Chapter 5; and Chapter 7 in this book). This explains the important number of experiences of violence at the intersection of the conjugal and professional I came across during fieldwork. It also helps to understand the strong denegation of specifically sexual forms of violence when they concern members of the electronic music scene, seen as a ‘family’ and its spaces as ‘home’. Sexual violence accordingly turns into a taboo subject, as often observed in closed social groups such as families (Dussy, 2013). Reactions of male artists to violent events are illustrative in this regard:

On the dancefloor, around 3 AM, Isa (DJ and producer, aged twenty-seven) grabs my arm and looks at me with a terrified expression on her face: ‘Can we go outside? Stay with me’. She takes my hand and leads me towards the exit; we end up sitting on the pavement opposite the club. She warns me: ‘I’m having an anxiety attack, but I’ll be fine’. A man ‘groped [her] arse’ earlier in the evening and she’s now having a ‘paranoid attack’, wondering if she’s been drugged. […] The stage manager joins us. They know each other well, he’s a local DJ too. He reassures her by saying: ‘Don’t worry, you’re at home, nothing will happen to you here’. (Field notes—2022)

Rumours are what happens when denunciations fail to emerge due to the private dimension of both the complaint, still considered an intimate matter or an epiphenomenon (Ahmed, 2021), and the professional environment itself. This last point is particularly salient when read through a feminist lens: spaces coded as private are key locations of the reproduction of gender-based violence (Brown et al., 2020; Kelly, 1987).

‘Washing the Dirty Linen in Private’:23 Internal Denunciation

Reputational Stigma Shifts from the Victim to the Denunciated

In some cases, rumours transform into ‘internal denunciations’ by gaining legitimacy within a network of peers. Firstly, for the rumour to overcome the various obstacles discussed above, it must concern cases of violence considered socially—but also criminally —as ‘serious’ and repeated. All the internal denunciations I observed concerned individuals who were denounced for sexual forms of violence and by several victims. Secondly, the denunciation gains greater traction when made by a man. As Luc Boltanski et al. (1984, p. 32) argue, ‘To carry out a normal denunciation, characterised in particular [...] by the otherness of the denouncer and the victim, one must have the authority to stand up for another individual, to fly (symbolically) to his or her aid’. When men report violent individuals on behalf of women or gender minorities, they are much less likely to be suspected of feminist zeal or exaggerating the situation. Here, gender serves the purpose of ‘otherness’ required in the de-singularisation process, enhancing the legitimacy of the complaint.

When an individual is denounced internally, the stigma gradually shifts from the victim’s reputation to that of the accused, now categorised in negative terms and no longer associated with sexuality but with violence:

I’m still surprised to learn that some of my mates behaved badly towards girls. I’m really shocked to learn that someone I’ve met in my life is actually an abuser. Like [this DJ]: he was such a good guy, I loved him. But turns out he’s a piece of shit. (Guillaume, DJ and producer, aged twenty-seven—2021)

Feelings of ‘surprise’ were frequent among male respondents recalling denunciations. They also materialise a moral boundary in terms of masculine behaviour—and more broadly, the associated practices in terms of masculinities (Connell, 2005)—which needs to be reaffirmed by clearly dissociating the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bastards’:

[While discussing a denunciation of rape] But he was a guy—I thought he was nice [emphasised], you know! But he wasn’t. And I’ve heard stories like that about people I knew when I was younger. I really felt they were people who wouldn’t do that. But they did. (Bruno, producer and live performer, aged thirty—2022)

Denunciations can then be accompanied by sanctions. The most common response of interviewees was to cancel the artist from a forthcoming event. ‘Given what I heard, we can’t endorse it’, says Marc (DJ and artistic director, aged thirty-four—2022) as he removes the name of an artist accused of sexual violence from the promotional poster he just received for an upcoming gig. Yet, no publicisation of this modification to the list of performers is made. Mathieu took similar action concerning a collaboration on his music label, which he cancelled:

I’ve been really clear with him, saying that I absolutely don’t want any weird business or problem, or any such thing. I just can’t commit to an album project if there are things… I mean, I need to trust the person. (Mathieu, DJ, producer and label manager, aged thirty-three—2022)

The egalitarian norms that circulate at work (Bereni & Jacquemart, 2018) can act as a catalyst for individual action. Indeed, deciding to exclude an aggressor from spaces and networks that the victim still frequents is a way of ‘acknowledging the existence of gender relations as power relations’ and trying to ‘reverse them by favouring the presence of the victim over the presence of the aggressor’ (Duriez, 2009, as cited in Fourment, 2017, p. 115). Interestingly, who these male denunciators are intimately involved with seems to matter. I observed that most of the male artists who spoke out against such colleagues were, or had been, in conjugal relationships with feminist women.

Speaking out and taking action can also positively impact the whistleblower’s professional reputation: ‘It all started with us, and I’m pretty proud of it’ (Marc, commenting on an internal denunciation, 2022). In other words, not only are men more likely to be heard when it comes to denouncing violence: by doing so, they gain a certain amount of professional recognition. This relative advantage male artists have in general—moreover, when they occupy positions of power in the hierarchies of the art world—can be perceived as an injustice by their peers, as Pascal (DJ and producer, aged twenty-nine—2022) recalls. One of his close friends, a DJ identifying as non-binary, refused to perform in a club where a member of the scene who had been spoken out against continued to work. Pascal suggested putting some pressure on the venue by using his own reputation as leverage: ‘If they want me to continue to play there, then this guy can’t be around’. His friend eventually asked him not to intervene, upset that Pascal might actually be listened to, unlike the victims or those lower down the professional hierarchy.

Generally, the electronic music world continues to be thought of as a world apart that has its own rules. Denunciations of violence should be dealt with as such. That is, between peers of a given professional network: the only recipients of the internal denunciation. During interviews and fieldwork, this sometimes means keeping the sociologist (a non-member of the art world) at bay:

Yeah, I’ve heard a lot about [an internally accused DJ we had been discussing]. And I’m thinking of another story about a guy who runs a festival, but I promised I wouldn’t talk about it. It goes a bit against what I was saying earlier, about denouncing and so on, but the person who told me was like ‘You really shouldn’t talk about it, it’s dealt with internally’. So, I’m not going to talk about it. (Loic, DJ and producer, aged twenty-five—2021)

If the personal reputation of the accused is partly tarnished in the professional arena where the internal denunciation circulates, his artistic reputation is not. The general public does not hear about the denunciation and continues to listen to his work in spaces that still book him. The involvement of male artists and other practitioners, through relaying and speaking out, enables denunciations to ‘grow’ towards social legitimacy (Boltanski et al., 1984). In return, the denunciator is symbolically rewarded by peers, given that he embodies, by his actions, the egalitarian ethos of the art world. That is, denunciations of sexual violence also ‘grow’ the reputation of the selfless denunciator. Finally, by ‘keeping it in the family’, far from the scrutiny of the public, no major destabilisation of the taboo subject of sexual violence is at stake.

The Case Gone Public: ‘Calling Out’

Unlike other art worlds, where forms of hierarchy can be the direct recipients of denunciations, the ways recruitment processes operate in electronic music impact publicisation practices. The recipient of the denunciation is the public—in the double sense of the audience and of the collective arena—as well as the support staff and artists ordinarily distant from the accused or the denunciator. Until then kept at bay, audiences and whole musical networks now become witnesses as well as actors in the organised boycott, becoming a form of ‘external authority’ (see Chapter 2 in this book). In all the cases I observed, the means by which denunciations are made public is through press releases posted on social media. The denunciators and signatories of statements are the artistic collectives to which the accused artists belong. The aim is to dissociate from the denounced to prevent any stigma tainting the group:

We have decided to break the silence on important issues and we sincerely hope that speaking out will encourage others to do the same. Fear and shame must change sides. A few months ago, the collective was shaken by the news that one of our members, Puzupuzu, had committed serious acts against multiple victims. […] This episode shook us all to the core: we realised that violence was present within our own communities and within our own collective, despite the values that have always underpinned it. (Extract of the statement posted by the Qui Embrouille Qui collective on their Facebook page, May 18, 2020)

A very similar rhetoric appears in other statements:

At the end of August, we received a message alleging rape of F. by a member of the Casual Gabberz collective, CLUBKELLY, during a party among their mutual circle of friends. After several exchanges with F., via a third party whom we sincerely thank, there is absolutely no doubt as to the veracity of her statements, and the nature of the alleged offences is serious enough for us to share the following message with you. [...] The actions CLUBKELLY is accused of run completely counter to the values of the other members of the collective and therefore of the collective itself. CLUBKELLY is therefore no longer a part of Casual Gabberz. (Extract of the statement posted by the Casual Gabberz collective on their Instagram page, October 27, 2023)

In the comments section under these statements, the public congratulates the signatories for their ‘honesty’ in denouncing the actions of a close colleague. The accused is explicitly named, while the identities of the victims remain hidden. But contrary to the cautious anonymisation identified in rumours, this imprecision helps to socially validate the denunciation, distancing it from the individual level associated with complaints and bringing it up to the general level associated with political causes (Boltanski et al., 1984).

In the studied cases, all publicly exposed individuals suffered direct repercussions, including the end of their artistic careers.24 After being called out,25 they stopped receiving propositions for bookings in clubs and festivals and eventually left the scene. As frequently heard: ‘You can destroy someone’s career’ (Justine, DJ and club employee, aged twenty-four—2022), and ‘As soon as you’re targeted, no matter what, it’s over’ (Jérémy, former DJ, aged thirty-two—2023). The stigma attached to the accused can then spread to those formerly close to him: ‘We were caught in the act as accomplices. Well, not accomplices, but like “we knew”’ (Jérôme, DJ and producer, aged thirty-five—2022). This stigma can also extend to professionals who continue to work with the exposed artist. ‘We thought it sucked, we didn’t understand why she continued to work with him’, commented Justine, regarding a female colleague who released new productions with a DJ publicly accused of sexual harassment. Or as evoked by Apolline:

With my agency, we decided to accept [a booking from an artistic group, soon after the public denunciation of one of its members]. As soon as it came out, loads of people around me were like ‘No, don’t play there, you can’t play there’. So eventually I said, ‘Oh, fuck it, I don’t give a damn about this booking anyway, I’m going to cancel it’. (Apolline, DJ, aged thirty—2022)

The effectiveness of being banned was also mentioned by an interviewee who had been publicly called out. He points out how his case was used as an example, regretting how ‘borderline guys’ position themselves in the denunciation process:

Guys who continued to call me for DJ sets would tell me that their headliners’ agents were cancelling bookings, that they didn’t want their artists’ names to be next to mine on a line-up. So, they ended up cancelling my bookings after all [...] That was quite hard to deal with, when borderline guys tell you ‘Oh no, we’re not going to book you for gigs any more’. Because symbolically… yeah, you’ve become a symbol of sexist and sexual violence. (Jérémy, former DJ, aged thirty-two—2023)

Yet, in reaffirming a latent obstacle where the onus is placed on victims, the effectiveness of public denunciations can hinder the possibilities of speaking out: ‘If he loses something, it’ll be my fault and I’ll be blamed’ (Sarah, photographer and amateur DJ, female, aged twenty-nine—2023). Moreover, the accused are, in many cases, close acquaintances of the victims—either professionally, in the sense of a fellow ‘community’ member, or a partner or ex-partner. Take, for instance, Charlène, who explains why she hasn’t publicly denounced another female artist:

I haven’t called her out because I don’t want her to be excluded. And at the same time, I don’t want to see her again, so I’ve isolated myself, I stopped going to events [...] But I don’t want to put her out of her job. I would hate it if I had to. I mean, I would never send messages to collectives or promoters saying, ‘You’ve booked the person who attacked me’, you know? (Charlène, DJ, aged thirty—2022)

Here, Charlène is referring to a female colleague whom she has denounced only internally. While the vast majority of the denunciations I observed involved men accused of violent behaviours towards women, certainly not all gender-based violence is committed by males or in heterosexual relations. In the twenty-two cases under study here, two concern women accused of violence towards other women. Though the empirical data is not sufficient for a deep analysis, it does allow us to formulate a hypothesis regarding the intricate obstacles to speaking out in such cases. The euphemising of women’s violence stems from sexism, while symmetrising male and female violence is simultaneously a masculinist theme (Cardi & Pruvost, 2011). Specifically, women denouncing female colleagues for such violence find themselves facing an additional double bind: a fear of fuelling masculinist or lesbophobic arguments26 and a refusal to jeopardise the careers of peers already disadvantaged in this male-dominated environment.

Public denunciations thus emerge at the end of a distinct process, and are received as socially valid because they are set forth by a group of peers. They concern acts of violence that are considered to be ‘serious’ (that is, when categorised as ‘sexual’ forms of violence), repeated and sometimes associated with police investigations. The denunciation thus leaves the private sphere, where it is partly ignored and partly managed, on a daily basis.

Ethnographic study of denunciations of gender-based violence in the French electronic music world brings to the fore three main observations. First, the rare public denunciations that emerge are not contradictory to the multiple untold or unheard rumours of gender-based violence. Public denunciation and the exclusion of the accused serve as an alterisation process, in a social world imagined as a close and closed community, somewhat comparable to a family where sexual forms of violence are not supposed to happen—or at least should be dealt with internally, out of the public eye.

Second, though denunciations of violence are evoked in the name of egalitarian principles, perpetrators face sanctions only if well-established and preferably male individuals or whole collectives act as whistle-blowers, thus giving accusations legitimacy. In this art world, individual reputations at the sexual, moral or political levels are entangled with professional reputations, and unequally distributed in terms of gendered power relations.

Finally, the fight against gender-based violence seems to have acquired the status of a recognised political cause, but this politicisation does not guarantee that each individual denunciation will be received as valid by peers. Moreover, ‘exemplary’ public accusations can paradoxically deter victims from speaking out, in addition to the other obstacles they encounter along the denunciation process. The egalitarian ethos, at least concerning the stance against gender-based violence, does not fundamentally disturb the gendered organisation of this art world.

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