Kyra D. Gaunt’s article “Youtube,
Twerking & You: Context Collapse and the Handheld Co-Presence of Black
Girls and Miley Cyrus” examines the impact of Miley Cyrus’ twerking and how the
white cooptation of this musical form impacts Black girls’ online socializations.
Overall, I found this article to be an enlightening and prolific evaluation of
the disruptive effect of these cooptations upon Black girls’ online presences. This
article also made me reflect upon much longer histories of the (white) American
cultural appropriation of Black culture for white stages. More specifically,
this article made me reflect upon Miley Cyrus’ twerking as an extension of long-standing
American minstrelsy traditions adapted for both the digital world and virtual
stage, and the “digital divide” inherent to these traditions.
To contextualize, blackface minstrelsy
is an American tradition starting in the 19th century in which
primarily white performers donned black “paint” (often shoe polish) and acted on
stage as Black caricatures. Since its inception, these traditions have been
foundational to the establishment and evolution of American film, music, literature,
and more. “Digital blackface”, therefore, functions as the most modern evolution
of this tradition and defines the various kinds of minstrelsy that have become
available in cyberspace (Jackson). Miley Cyrus in twerking (and in her VMA
performance especially), seems to be participating in both.
Gaunt goes to great lengths to
establish the significance of twerking as a social and cultural identifier for
Black (particularly femme) youth in the United States. So much so that she
argues “twerking is a form of vlogging for adolescent black girls whose bodies
speak more powerfully than their voices” online (Gaunt 252). As such, Cyrus
doesn’t simply co-opt or mimic a form of movement in her performance, instead she
appropriates a fundamental form of Black cultural expression and community allegiance
and proceeds to commodify it as a mere mechanism of entertainment. Not to
mention, she does so in an attempt to “other” herself from the Disney persona
of her youth, and through this “othering”, enforces the othering of Black women
and girls (Gaunt 247). In this action Cyrus clearly builds upon minstrel
traditions and firmly compounds the place of minstrelsy in mainstream modern American
culture. This compounding is particularly relevant as witnessed in the
reception of the performance within digital spaces. Meaning, in the publicization
of this performance Cyrus affords herself a digital ownership of twerking as a
form, especially reflected in the celebration and popularity of Cyrus’ video over those of African American content creators. This eclipse not only allows Cyrus' bastardized performance to trivialize the long history of twerking in internet and cultural archives, it also re-marginalizes Black femme creators within these digital spaces.
I think this reflects
a different sort of digital divide, one not predicated in terms of class or physical access but instead upon the racial inequities of the physical world that have
been programmed into the digital one. There is a clear cultural privilege
afforded to white performers such as Miley Cyrus in digital arenas, so much so
that she and her videos are espoused as defining of an entire genre they
have no legitimate claim over. Though there are clear divides in who has access
to the internet and internet technologies at all, I think this example makes
clear that there are also tangible divisions in whose cultural contributions are
valued in digital spaces. After all, the Internet (though even the most modern evolution of culture) is permeated with the same racist traditions and patterns of exclusion as every other American media form, and needs to be critically addressed as such.
Gaunt, Kyra. (2015). YouTube, Twerking & You:
Context Collapse and the Handheld Co-Presence of Black Girls and Miley Cyrus.
Journal of Popular Music Studies. 27. 10.1111/jpms.12130.
Jackson, Lauren Michele. “We Need to Talk About
Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs.” Teen
Vogue, 2 Aug. 2017.
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