by Celeste Reeb, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English

[gentle harpsichord jingle] [music reminiscent of the Jaws theme playing] [exotic percussive music]

Anyone who watches the majority of their media with closed captioning (CC) turned on is aware that captions can often get creative with their phrasing. This creativity can be humorous, can evoke the same campiness of B-movies (as seen in the examples above), but can create frustrating experiences for those who rely upon captions to communicate sonic elements. Online conversations of captioning focus on odd phrasings or terminology, comedic mis-captioning, or demanding better captioning practices. Academic conversations of captioning focus on federal requirements, captioning to help educational or language learning, scientific studies, or are more geared towards issues of subtitling. There are some scholars such as Sean Zdenek whose work on captioning has helped create a framework of viewing captioning as a series of rhetorical choices. I hope to bring the better captioning demands together with a critical analysis of the rhetorical choices in captioning to argue that it is not a neutral process, but rather, an ideologically influenced one. 

Rhetoric and our perceptions of sound are influenced by discourses surrounding race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. Closed captioning, frequently coded as disabled, becomes a space where the tensions surrounding language, bodies, and sound emerge. These tensions reveal how language and sound are used to maintain structures of power. For instance, I am currently working on a chapter focusing on race and captioning, which has shown that people of color are mis-captioned at higher rates than white actors. These mis-captions take the form of writing out the wrong phrases, such as in Season 2 Episode 1 of Living Single, when a character refers to a friend as “shorty,” but the captioner changed this to “him.” These mis-captions can often take the form of trying to correct language variations like African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to American Standard English, or what Geneva Smitherman calls Standard White English. These mis-captions remove important narrative information and characterization, and act to reinforce white dominance through controlling actors of color through rhetorical representation in CC. 

This past spring at Society for Cinema and Media Studies, I was able to discuss the refusal to mark when actors of color perform a white accent, such as in Dave Chappelle’s standup specials. Marking these vocal changes is important for both the intended humorous impact, but also because this accent is often used to mark the different lived experiences of whites and people of color. Currently, I have been creating a database of mis-captions found in shows starring predominantly actors of color to show how frequently actors of color are mis-captioned when compared to white actors. 

Scenes of sex are also a place where attempts to control bodies through language become apparent. By going through hundreds of television sex scenes and about 400 pornography videos on Pornhub (under their newly created Closed Caption category), I have found that the captioning reinforces hetero-normativity/ able-bodiedness. This is done by marking queer sex in ways heterosexual sex is not. For example, in Queer as Folk and Orange is the New Black, the captions include terms such as [men moaning] and [women moaning] for queer sex, whereas in representations of heterosexual sex it is just simply, [both moaning]. 

Captions often mark difference or deviation from the norm through word choice. In September 2019, my article “[This Closed Captioning is brought to you by Compulsive Heterosexuality/Able-bodiedness]” will be appearing in Disability Studies Quarterly.

One question I have yet to unpack but will eventually attempt to in this dissertation is: How can CC create the same bodily responses as those that are caused by comedy and those caused by horror films? Both of these genres are heavily discussed regarding sound: either horror’s use of music to create tension (think eerie string music) or comedy’s use of timing and vocal intonation. As a lover of horror but as someone who is also what is technically referred to as a giant fraidy cat, I look forward to unpacking the relationship between sound, the horror genre, and how audiences interact with these images when utilizing CC. In the end, I am hoping that this dissertation begins conversations about what logics influence word choice, how CC reveals many of our anxieties, and how we all can work for a better system of closed captioning.

—Celeste Reeb, a doctoral candidate in the UO Department of English, was awarded the 2019-20 CSWS Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship.