About

Music for Girls - Keynote Presentation: Kyra Gaunt

Did you know YouTube began as a dating site? And the demise suffered from doxxing the 2003 Janet Jackson Superbowl video kickstarted the platform? When we search and discover music on YouTube or TikTok (formerly Musical.ly app)—the top destinations for kids under the age of thirteen—we rarely think our clicks, likes, and shares are grooming the online sexual enticement of 3-year-old to 14-year-old Black girls whose hips make rap hits go viral. Kyra Gaunt’s talk exposes the wickedly complex system that masks how music orchestrates structural violence against girls under the guise of a free musical Internet. Everybody but the Black girl profits.

Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. has been a cutting-edge scholar in the field of embodied ethnomusicology for more than two decades. Her first book, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, won the 2007 Alan Merriam Prize from The Society of Ethnomusicology. The book and Kyra's earlier publications contributed to the emergence of black girlhood studies and hip-hop feminism. Her current research, featured in the 2022 TED Talk “How Black Girls Can Reclaim Their Voice in Music” (bit.ly/3Ymq3mF), is a primer to her 2nd book, PLAYED: How Music and Tech Orchestrate Violence Against Black Girls on YouTube (SUNY Press).

(Photo credit: Jamey Stillings) “Everybody but the Black Girl Profits”

(Audiences are invited to attend in person, but Kyra Gaunt will be participating in the keynote and Q&A via Zoom)