[This Closed Captioning is brought to you by Compulsive Heterosexuality/Able-bodiedness]

Abstract

This paper examines the way that language attempts to categorize and control bodies through the space of closed captioning. The paper examines three different incidents of closed captioned in television sex scenes to argue that queering and cripping provide a framework to examine how the rhetorical choices in closed captioning reflect larger anxieties over bodies engaged in pleasure in a space coded as "disabled." In considering closed captioning as a space coded as "disabled" what is made caption-visible (and what is not) can enforce a dual binary of heterosexuality/abe-bodiedness against queer/disabled. This dual binary is examined in three different case studies, Scandal, Queer as Folk, and Orange is the New Black; all 3 examples provide an overview of how closed captioning has performed ideological work which has largely gone unnoticed. This paper intervenes into the scholarly work which positions closed captioning as just a federal mandate or technological advancement. Instead, we should be looking at closed captioning as a series of rhetorical choices. By examining captioning, we can see the limits of defining, categorizing, and containing bodies and sex through language and disrupt ideas of normalcy which are being enacted in the space of closed captioning.