This Closed Captioning Brought To You By…

The current discourse of captioning enforces a captions façade of neutral technology, but this view of captions as neutral doesn’t answer:
Why are Black actors miscaptioned at higher rates than their white counterparts? Why do television sex scenes caption queer sex differently than heterosexual sex? Why do captions “correct” language into standard American English? Captions are a series of rhetorical choices created by captioners and influenced by a society that values specific types of bodies, pleasure, languages, races, genders and sexualities. Join us for a talk by Celeste Reeb that will examine how closed captions, which are often coded as a disabled space, reveal normative logics of marginalization.