Gender, transgression and sexual violence at Australian music festivals

Despite frequent media attention highlighting the prevalence of sexual violence at music festivals across the globe, there has been virtually no academic engagement with the topic. This chapter presents key findings from one of the first studies internationally to examine this issue. In doing so, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage, alongside critical realist feminism and science and technology studies frameworks, which understand the social, cultural and material worlds as co-constructing one another in a complex, fluid entanglement. We use this theoretical framing to examine how the particular spatial, cultural and social elements and gendered practices of Australian music festivals align to create contexts in which sexual violence occurs. While sexual violence is pervasive across virtually all social settings, we suggest that the unique features of (or assemblages formed within) festivals require us to examine the particularities of these spaces. In contrast to the view that music festivals are generally liminal or socially transgressive spaces, we argue here that festival spaces and practices often reinforce and perpetuate the dominant norms and social structures that underpin gendered violence more broadly.