Wheeler, ElizabethReeb, Celeste2020-09-242020-09-24https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25711“Closed Captioning: Reading Between the Lines” argues that captions are a series of rhetorical choices created by captioners influenced by ideological networks which value specific types of bodies, pleasure, language, races, genders, affects, and sexualities. This dissertation is an interwoven and interdisciplinary attempt to explore how these ideologies are made visible in the space of closed captioning. The project analyzes the captioning for over 1,000 texts including film, television, online pornography, standup comedy, and the rhetoric regarding captioning to reveal how captioning reproduces normative logics. Current discourse of captioning enforces its façade of neutral technology, which obstructs viewing how it makes visible the production of normative logics through language. The dissertation examines how captioning and discourse about captioning reinforce heterosexuality and able-bodiedness; privilege seeing as the primary factor for affective experiences such as pleasure and horror, which limits their effectiveness; and reinforce values of whiteness. While captioning is an important technological element, it is important because of its role in people’s lives. It is important because people use it and make meaning from the captions. Therefore, each chapter examines how captioning reveals something about people: how people perform gender and sexuality; how and where people experience pleasure; how people use language to dominate others; and how people embody film viewing. Captioning should not come with the price of further marginalization of people, nor should it be a reproduction of normative logics that isolated d/Deaf and hard of hearing viewers for so long. This dissertation includes previously published material.en-USAll Rights Reserved.CaptioningDeafDisabilityQueerRhetoricSexualityElectronic Thesis or Dissertation