Will Black Girls Make it Rain?: An Anthropological Introduction to Twerking on YouTube

Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D.
Created in collaboration with 19 students in two sections of my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology courses this summer. To learn about doing ethnography, students joined me in studying black girls twerking. 
We collected data following in the digital footprints of Michael Wesch, Ph.D. at Kansas State University. Thanks Mike for sharing your Snapshots Google Docs from 2008. 
The difference between Wesch's work and ours? He studied personal vlogging with his students. I studied what might be considered the personal vlogging for black girls: adolescent girls twerking from their bedrooms. 

They are flirting with the camera just like Gary Broulma once did to the Numa Numa song -- butt different (pun intended). They are free from the harm offline of boys touching and teasing them but online they may get worse treatment that affects all girls generally. 
The ethnographic study of black girls who twerk on YouTube has powerful message to tell us about YouTube's media ecology esp. as it related to rap music videos and the sexualization of teens today. Girls are not the only ones who need to learn to be responsible for their self-presentation online and for the content we upload and broadcast of ourselves. Other people can exploit it for ad revenue and other social capital and currency. 
This is the first video in a series from our findings this summer. 


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Video production by Dajelyn Diaz with editing feedback from students and Dr. Gaunt.

Digital ethnography in collaboration with Baruch College undergraduates who participated in ANT1001 - Summer Session I 2014. 
Part of the Black Girls Twerking YouTube Project (BGTYT) by Dr. Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D.