2017 Tsou Scholar Kyra Gaunt
Thursday, November 2, 7 p.m.
Helen Filene Ladd Hall, Zankel Music Center

Lecture: Keep Dat A$$ Jumpin: Tween Black Girls and the Costs of Corporate-Controlled User-Generated Content

How do corporate-controlled musical spaces and online engagment normalize the sexploitation of the tween Black girls’ online? From studying over 600 YouTube twerking videos (2008–14), we will discuss the “bottom lines” at the intersections of race, gender, age, and digital technology. Who profits and who is exploited by the free musical play and monetizing of music that dominates YouTube?

Kyra Grant of the State University of New York at Albany, one of the earliest professors to teach hip-hop, helped define the emerging field of girlhood and black girlhood studies.

Tickets: $8 adults, $5 seniors/Skidmore, free for students and children

About the Speaker

Ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt is professor, author, YouTube ethnographer, and a TED fellow whose work contributed to the emergence of black girlhood studies and hip-hop feminism. Author of the prize-winning book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, she studies participatory music and the unintended consequences of race, gender, and technology for members of marginalized groups from YouTube to Wikipedia. Gaunt is also a classically trained vocalist, a jazz improviser, and an R&B singer-songwriter. Her CD Be the True Revolution is available on iTunes and CDBaby.