Twerking is the art of bouncing your booty to the beats and rhymes of rap or pop songs but it also lives at the intersection of music, monetization, and patriarchal violence. Twerking began to trend in Google Search results in 2011 and peaked when Miley Cyrus and other mega and micro-celebs went viral with their own booty-dancing on Facebook, YouTube, and at the MTV Video Music Awards during 2013. What most general-audience users overlook is what what we do does and to whom. What we do when we search for our favorite music on YouTube threatens to undo the #MeToo movement for the very girls founder Tarana Burke initially intended to help? This is music as violence; out of sight. During this talk, digital ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt explains how a phenomena known as context collapse makes music and YouTube harmful for many girls.

Kyra Gant. TED Fellows Retreat – August 26-30, 2015, Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, CA. Photo: Bret Hartman/TED

Professor Gaunt is a notable ethnomusicologist whose ethnography The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop published by New York University Press won the 2007 Alan Merriam Book Prize for most outstanding English-speaking monograph awarded by the Society for Ethnomusicology. In 2009 Gaunt was honored as one of the inaugural TED Fellows. Gaunt spoke at the 2015 TEDx East in New York City about the challenges and misconceptions behind the net worth and value of young black and African American girls who twerk on YouTube.