The Sex Playlist: How Race and Ethnicity Mediate Musically “Composed” Sexual Self-Formation

Abstract

Music can function as a powerful technology of the sexual self. Especially with the advent of music streaming platforms such as Spotify, musical playlists are used in instrumental ways to regulate the self and the social in intimate situations. However, something puzzling is going on with these sex playlists, as they are typically aligned with black performers, whereas “love” playlists in Spotify tend to be dominated by white artists. In this chapter, we look at ways to understand this curious alignment of ethno-racial categories with playlists on sex and love, and we argue that these are tied with music genres and relatively stable ideas about racialized bodies, which bear consequences for how the sexual self is musically “composed.”