Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D.

Ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt. Ph.D. Is the author of the award-winning, radical counter-history The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. Her reflexive analysis revealed the hidden musicianship in marginalized girls’ embodied play. For over 20 years, she has examined black girls’ agency within the patriarchal, heteronormative socialization of race, gender, age and voice that informs the embodied sound cultures and kinetic oralities of musical blackness. She is currently at work on an ethnography that examines multiple forms of capital in musical new media and the unintended consequences of YouTube videos for marginalized black girls.