Ruby Strong

[rubykarelia]

SHOOTING BLANKS (personal essay, 2022)

“Can I pray for you?” my therapist, Sharon, asked.

I worried that she could see my bemused expression through the static silence. Nobody had ever asked to pray for me before. When my dog died, an acquaintance proffered a limp sentiment in my Facebook inbox, “I’ll keep you in my prayers.” But then, it was a sentence, not a question.

My relationship with God was especially long-distance—He and I spoke through some kind of interlocutor, much like the phone through which Sharon and I spoke. Never did I try to extend my voice alone. I grew up in a staunchly secular household, so religion was just a taste I'd never acquire. Eves of worship that ushered in pastel-laden holidays and round, anemic wafers that dissolved on the tongue like tabs of expired acid. My mother was raised Roman Catholic, and she told us how my grandma had bowed to the postwar nuclear wraith and beset her household accordingly. Mom was as manicured as their front lawn; the only daughter, she was the original sin, sent to etiquette school to learn how to stand poised and upright before falling dutifully on her knees. Unimpressed, she escaped each Saturday night to punk rock shows in the city before catching a late-night bus back to the suburbs, just in time to attend the next morning’s mass, a Cinderella in her Sunday best. She moved out of her family home right away, and with that, she and Him hadn't spoken since.

In the heat of Sharon’s anticipatory pause, it occurred that she intended to pray for me immediately, right then and there, over the phone. She seemed unbothered that it might break policy or cross an ethical boundary. I thought about it for a moment and decided that it didn’t have to be serious. In fact, I smiled at the prospect of gaining a new anecdote to tell to my close friends. “Guys,” I’d say to my roommates after the appointment. “Guess what my therapist did today.” Inevitably, I'd then punctuate the story with a quippy button, something like, "You always hear about people advocating to separate church and state, but is this what they mean by it—church and state of mind?" If we laughed, it would've been all worth it.

It took me a moment to return to the moment and remember who Sharon was, what she was asking, why she was so ready to turn to a higher power. At once, I felt a familiar urgency: What if it works? The drama of it working was alluring, perfumed.

I’d started talking to Sharon when I felt as if I couldn't walk anymore. The heavy feeling wasn’t new—like a tedious relative, it had long overstayed its welcome. Cycles of over-and-over and again and again, a type of dust that can be cleaned but then settles in thicker. The weight sometimes lifted—there was contentment and confidence in those smiling bouts, but they always precipitated a hangover that mourned its own arrival. The ways I tried to lift myself out of the heaviness were always unhealthy, like the odd drunken evening or something sharper. These mechanisms were beyond tragic, but their greatest fault was never working. Fruitless was trying to conquer heaviness, it seemed—in fact, in my late teens, I quit food for a summer or so to no avail. Humour fit in when only words were available. By the time I moved out of my parents’ house, there were anthologies of looseleaf stashed under my childhood bed, memoirs in which I pared myself down in strange and unnatural ways. I wrote me out, putting me somewhere. When I moved out, I left them there—I stopped writing, and the heaviness returned to my hands. I lugged it to the grocery store and the bus stop and the laundromat and back home again. I grew heavier on each commute, and whatever I collected, I was too afraid to unpack. It was a hopeless observance that was forever looking, forever avoiding being looked at. If prayer could ease the burden, why not? God, I hope this will work.

For a moment, I worried that my agnosticism would pose an issue for Sharon. Maybe, if a nonbeliever was the target of an intercessory prayer, it’d be like shooting blanks. There was something profoundly sad about this possibility, and I cursed Sharon’s blessings before she could say them aloud. An unheard prayer summoned the same brand of tragedy as a letter returned to its sender, a personal ad in the classifieds, a missed call to the wrong number. 

I’d questioned my faith before, and maybe that gave me some currency. I'd once befriended a gaggle of Christian girls in my class. They wore gilded cross-necklaces and clothes from the nice stores, and their moms were sugary-sweet, and each week they got to go to church together. I always liked the idea of getting invited. I once went with my grandma. I struggled to keep my eyes open during the scripture readings, but it was only because the building made me feel calm; in perfect symmetry, each polished pew faced a smiling apse, and the ceilings were tall and made me feel small. I began telling the girls at school that I, too, was a Christian. ‘Prove it,’ one of them once challenged me. I couldn't.

I was also concerned that Sharon's prayer might be strained by the phone's metal mesh, stretched too thin as it reached for the cell tower and up to where I assumed it needed to go. To me, electricity always seemed antithetical to the prayerful, like when a kid I babysat showed me the Bible app on his iPad. Prayer was supposed to be raw, unlit. I thought about confession, or what I’d seen of it on TV: a crown of candle's amber dusk, a cathartic rasp to an ancient man on the other side of a teak cubicle. Quickly, I fashioned Sharon as the old man, the phone as our teak wall, the static grain of wires and tin humming like a distant, off-key psalm.

I’d seen therapists in-person before, but I had trouble looking them in the eye. Though I didn’t have tales of clandestine affairs or crimes to confess, my anxieties nonetheless made my shoulders fold in on themselves like I was a guilty suspect, and the placid gaze of a therapist burned through me like the upper hand of a seasoned detective. But Sharon was across the country, and from our first session, I came prepared to talk. She had called every second Thursday for almost six months, and before each appointment, I put my chair in the far corner of my bedroom and shoved a towel under the door. I wanted to be honest and loud about it. I didn’t cry during our sessions, just spoke. This was a good thing; nobody had ever known me so well. 

When Sharon began the prayer, she opened with the same address that my grandma recited before each meal. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and braced myself. As I sank into my chair, my mind sifted through her words—some sounded foreign to me through the metallic debris, and they passed each other urgently as if they were all rushing off somewhere. She sandwiched my name between unfamiliar aphorisms and spoke in a rehearsed meter that was distractingly poetic, though I could make out her final pleas to God. She asked him to bring me good things, nice thoughts. She asked him, "Bring Ruby peace." I began to cry. "Amen."

We were out of time. We booked another appointment, then I hung up the phone and sat in the silence. I expected a revelatory sensation to follow—not something material, like the peripheral pageant of a halo atop my head. No, I scavenged in the stillness for light and lightness, for that divine symmetry I felt in church with my grandma. I waited, and I wait.

All I truly knew was that I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. I floated to the living room, told them what Sharon had done for me, and we had a good laugh.

When I inherited the pages, the old diaries, I read myself again. Everything I’d ever felt was divided by generous, misused commas. There were big words I didn't understand anymore, barely understood back then. The girl on the page was outdated, but she was well-read, and read well. I agreed with her on everything, right down to her name. She wasn't gospel, but she made a lot of points.

I still find my hands joining together when I’m particularly lost. Sometimes, I upturn my chin, look at the ceiling. Maybe I speak out loud, too, and ask the hanging lamp for my next move. I don’t get an answer, but—thank god—I end up choosing one anyway.

[rubykarelia]

UNCANNING THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT: An Acoustemological Examination of the Laugh Track (media analysis, 2022)

Induced, of course, by the supposed infantilism of sensual pleasures, laughter can largely be accounted for by the mechanism of repression. Laughter is a defense against the forbidden fruit. 

— Theodor W. Adorno, 1954, pg. 223

There are countless running jokes in NBC’s Friends. Many of these ‘long cons’ can be described quite simply—consider one of Friends most reprised crutches: Monica, now a decidedly slender adult woman, was fat as a teenager. This backstory predicates a string of drollery and physical sight gags that weave throughout the sitcom's famed ten seasons. In “The One With The Prom Video,” Courteney Cox dons a fatsuit and prosthetic chin to embody the younger version of Monica in an old home video. As the gang huddles around the television intently, three of the eponymous twenty-somethings see her as a teenager for the first time (Junge & Burrows, 1996).

“Someone ate Monica!” Joey hollers. 

“Shut up! The camera adds ten pounds,” Monica quips. 

“How many cameras are actually on you?” Chandler asks mockingly.

I first watched the sitcom in my mid-teens, two decades after its 1994 release. Abuzz from a cursory skim of feminist discourse, I immediately identified the running joke as offensive and outdated. At best, I didn’t think it was particularly funny. I wondered, at once: who would laugh at this? As soon as I asked the question, I heard its answer, as it was embedded in the very diegetic fibre of the episode: the audience laughed. 

Discussions on the laugh track tend to focus on its (in)ability to, simply, make us laugh. As it gradually disappears from the listings of modern television, I have found that there is a scarcity of op-eds that sincerely lament its retirement. Most often associated with the sitcom—the supposedly lowest brow of an already lowbrow medium like TV—the prospect of a show preempting laughter towards its own jokes seems to many like a transgression of the literary tradition (Hurd, 2006, p.763). Moreover, critics posit that the laugh track insults at-home viewers’ intelligence by, essentially, suggesting that we could not understand a joke without it, as if it is merely a manipulation of laughter’s contagious nature, a scientific truth proved tenfold in studies such as those conducted by Nosanchuk and Lightstone (1974), Owren and Bachorowski (2003), and Sophie Scott (2015). Much of contemporary discourse thus celebrates the television industry’s gradual retiring of the laugh track, eulogizing the phenomenon with a less-than-mournful sense of defiance. 

By this logic, the laugh track’s perceived plummet into antiquity is long overdue. In “Don’t Make Me Laugh”, Kenneth L. Brewer breaks down this commentary into categories, claiming that both media pundits and casual viewers tend to exaggerate the laugh track’s ability to coerce, stupefy, and deceive audiences into laughing (2018). Instead, the laugh track functions much like a spotlight, and its influence is solely measured by its capacity to effectively brighten a joke for the at-home audience. This essay, however, will not reiterate Brewer’s work; rather, I advocate against reducing the laugh track to the physiological phenomenon it is assumed to elicit. After all, is the laugh track just that—laughter? What happens when laughter is tracked?

Accordingly, this essay adopts an historical approach to contextualize the laugh track as, above all, a deeply complex sonic artifact. I contend that the laugh track is the echo of subjectivity that systematically punctuates much of our objective mass culture. As such, I outline how recorded laughter first appeared in early radio to reconcile the changing phenomenologies of both audience and performer. As the new medium mechanized the theatre into a purely acoustic space, radio comedians and mass audiences considered the laugh track as a practical spatial cue as it reconfigured traditional architectonics of performance. I further examine how the advent of television—and the subsequent invention of the ‘Laff Box’—necessitated the use of recorded laughter to signal additional temporal boundaries. Finally, I attune my analysis to the industry’s deployment of the laugh track as a means of reinforcing particular ideologies; here, I demonstrate that production companies appropriate laughter to naturalize the biases encoded in institutionalized humour. Ultimately, recorded laughter is not, simply, laughter; it indeed induces “social bonding through sound” but in ways more complex than by simply “manipulating the emotional response of audiences” (my emphasis; Horowitz, 2012, ch.7). Rather, it is a signal of suggestion, whose presence in comedy is inextricable from a multifold of historical traditions and ideological premises. 

To consider recorded laughter as an artifact of significant and complex acoustemological influence, we must first consider the rise of mass media technologies in the early twentieth century. Wireless sounds—radio, in particular—established a new phenomenology of ‘audience’—that is, such technologies turned communication “into a mass experience” that “shook the place of the individual in the United States” (Lenthall, 2007, p.17). This shift invoked an “anxious tenor” among Americans; the advent of radio not only allowed for a voice to reach “a new mass subject” but also complicated the sensorial nuances of live performance (Fisher, 2015, p.154). Presumably, any on-air interlocutor would now notice the absence of an audience’s register. Prior to radio, it was an inevitability that audience members make themselves known throughout a performance, whether it be through a titter, groan, gasp, or weighted silence. Even the attendees of Ancient Greek amphitheatres were expected to sound throughout the humourous satyrs of City Dionysia; the audible audience was a certitude that the twentieth-century comedian had been conditioned to both fear and desire. This spatial and temporal unity was essential to stage performance before, of course, the spoken word could be reanimated by machines to be heard by a faraway, silent collective. 

Monosensory mass media and the prospect of an invisible listening ear challenged radio performers and audiences alike. In 1960, Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter spoke to recording technologies’ mechanization of the “well of loneliness that is acoustic space” (Carpenter & McLuhan, 1960, pg.208). In the theatre, especially, such isolation was antithetical to a successful performance, as, traditionally, theatrical art “cannot be separated from audience reaction” (Adorno, 1954, p.214). Integral to the social space of the theatre is the transference of acoustical energies between performer and spectator—the stir of the audience, as well as the voice of the performer, construct the environment and architecture of the theatre through sonic means (Sterne, 1997, p.29). The on-stage actor, in particular, is privileged by the added “precision of visual orientation” as an impetus for his performance (Carpenter & McLuhan, 1960, pg.68). No longer, however, could the radio performer ‘play to the audience,’ as the audience was subsumed within a mass society that stretched unprecedented spatial bounds (Lenthall, 2008, p.17-18). The audience was listening but absent, both in sight and sound.

Henceforth, the sound of laughter played a major role in mediating radio’s physical rupture between speaker and listener. Having had their start in vaudeville or on Broadway, comedians of the 1930s instinctively turned to the audience to establish the accustomed “proscenium arch” of theatre (Giotta, 2017, p.337). Many historians cite comedian Eddie Cantor as a pioneer of the laugh track, as he was famously unsettled by the lack of reception to his jokes and insisted that in-studio personnel and guests vocalize their reactions to his sets (Giotta, 2017). For Cantor and others of his ilk, accompanying laughter “[normalized] the new media’s elimination of the visual source of sound” (Naeem, 2011, 476). The audible audience guided radio’s new fleet of comedians as it mediated the genre’s reliance on theatrical architectonics. As a stage was born in radio’s boundless sonic theatre, so too were the audience’s pews.

Beyond laughter’s inherent capacity to elicit a laughing response, in the early days of mass media, laughter’s primary effect on listeners was one of pacification. Before such technologies, the act of hearing was “experienced most typically as a sensation having a specific source,” and the disembodied human voice was therefore considered fundamentally “mysterious…and possibly dangerous,” (Brady, 1999, p.32-45). As discussed, wireless sound technologies like the radio conceived of a purely acoustic experience, meaning the listening experience was “completely divorced from the usual accompanying sensory information” (Brady, 1999, p.33). Laughter naturalized the seemingly supernatural voices that emanated from the device by acoustically embodying the familiar stir typically heard within the theatre’s sonic space (Sterne, 1997). From an acoustemological approach, listeners know-through the audible laughter, attuned to the “contextual and experiential” way laughter signifies presence and performance (Feld, 2015, p.12). In sum, audible laughter began as a spatialization device used to simulate the sonic architecture of traditional theatre (Eisenberg, 2015, p.196). Just as radio introduced a new dawn of comedic performance, so too did television—however, comedic television saw the advent of distinctly pre-recorded laughter to reconcile this shift. 

The transition to television, I argue, marks the oft-overlooked but fundamental nature of the laugh track: its existence as an echo of laughter, representative of but detached from its particular origin. For context, I must first delineate the terms of this media shift as at odds with the cultural fascination with liveness. Following the Depression, American government officials enforced financial incentives to increase residential construction in suburban areas—here, young middle-class couples could rear families with traditional domestic ideals and away “from the anxieties and uncertainties of public life” (Spigel, 1988, p.13-14). Moreover, the television set was incorporated into the nuclear family structure due to “its capacity as a unifying agent,” which “fit well with the more general hope for a return to family values” (Spigel, 1992, p.39). The placement of the television in the home fulfilled television’s utopian promise to “conquer space” in bringing public intrigue into the family’s private haven. However, live broadcasting was prone to error and posed a fiscal threat to film studios. As such, television production companies adopted engineer Charles Douglass’s ‘Laff Box’ in the early 1950s (Giotta, 2017). As Gina Giotta asserts, the emergence of pre-recorded laughter would help bring the networks’ “longstanding dream of controlled liveness” to fruition (Giotta, 2017, p.339). Henceforth, the sound of laughter was a means of knowing both space and time when early mass media disrupted these sensorial instincts. 

In this vein, distinctly recorded laughter takes on an additional acoustemological objective of invoking liveness. Like other recorded ‘echoes,’ the laugh track is a “facsimile of an original sound, a reflection of time passed” that does not encapsulate but gestures to a specific sensation (Smith, 2015, p.54). In other words, recording laughter strips it of its context and appropriates it as a basic sonic signal. Douglass’s laff box, an anthology of recordings taken before the war and appropriated in loop form, was played by a behind-the-scenes ‘Laff Boy’ to ‘sweeten’ an in-studio audience’s tepid reaction or supplement it altogether (Smith, 2012; Giotta, 2017). Here, divorced from the nuances of its original context, Douglass’s recorded laughter is not necessarily laughter but its artifacts: the vestiges of social exchange, theatrical space, and ephemerality (Smith, 2015, p.58). Its liveness, then, is reproducible at will—in fact, the Laff Box was ‘played’ much like an instrument. According to Jacob Smith, the Laff Boy in charge of operating this organlike machine was a performer himself as he “relied on skill, timing, and taste” to simulate the typical sounds of theatrical performance within a sitcom’s narrative (Smith, 2012, p.535). For the at-home audience, the echoes of laughter produced “a sense of ‘being there, a kind of hyper realism…a sense of live spontaneous action” (Spigel, 1988, pg.22-23). As Mark M. Smith asserts, “recordings are inherently ahistorical,” removed from the contextual nuances of a sound’s origin (Smith, 2015, p.58); all that remains in the laugh track, then, is its fundamental epistemic qualities. 

Critiques of the phenomenon problematically conflate Douglass’s recorded laughter—and the laugh track technologies that emerged in later years—with laughter in its original context. For example, Slavoj Žižek posits that canned laughter “[relieves] us of even our duty to laugh” by “laughing instead of us” (Žižek, 1989, p.33). I maintain, however, that the laugh track is not actually laughing; that is, the laugh track is “an artifact of the event, not simply…the event itself” (Sterne, qtd. in Smith, 2015, p.58). The origins of a single canned chuckle would be impossible to trace—we will never know who was laughing and at what, not least due to industry secrecy. The Laff Boy does not laugh for us, either; he presses a button to play the laughter, but he is not required to find the joke funny, himself. To consider sitcom’s recorded laughter as real laughter invoked by the happenings on-stage is not only erroneous, but much too narrow of a claim; the spatial and temporal influences of recorded laughter are demonstrative of the more complex ways we can ‘know-through’ sound. 

Moreover, I would extend the laugh track’s epistemic scope to its capacity to ‘naturalize-through’ sound—accordingly, in this final section, I argue that the laugh track’s most repercussive use is as an instrument of ideological suggestion. As Adorno asserts in a 1954 paper, mass media invites individuals “to look at the characters in the same way without being made aware that indoctrination is present” (Adorno, 1954, p.224). Kenneth L. Brewer claims that adopting this perspective in laugh track studies risks capturing the television viewer as, in his words, “the buffoonish other,” who “uncritically soaks up the political and ideological messages” of comedy (Brewer, 2018, p.23). I agree that we should avoid consequentializing the laugh track prematurely and instead consider this trend from a top-down approach. Accordingly, I will narrow this section to the media industry’s deployment of the laugh track’s acoustemological power.

As stated, twentieth-century technological developments saw the formation of a mass audience—consequently, the culture industry attempted to reflect “an objective style of life and perception” that was disproportionately slanted to the suburban fantasy (Adorno, 1972, pg.81). Not only did this objectify the spatial and temporal elements of traditional theatre, but it also naturalized the dominant ideals of American life: “white, comfortably (upper) middle class, and happily ensconced in the suburbs” (Pugh, 2018, p.27). Quite often, this projection was government-sanctioned; for example, in the mid-30s, the Federal Housing Administration enforced redlining practices that excluded Black families from the ‘utopian’ suburbs (Spigel, 1988). Accordingly, the television industry tailored its content to the white, heterosexual, wealthy suburbanite—consider the family sitcom Leave It to Beaver, which, in 6 seasons, only featured one episode with a speaking African-American character: a maid portrayed by Kim Hamilton. This critique of mass media is not groundbreaking and can be traced back to television’s infancy; regardless, the factor of objectification is essential when considering both the sociological history of canned laughter and comedy at large. 

Major literary scholars have attributed the reinforcement of norms as intrinsic to social humour. Roger B. Henkle, for instance, theorized that “axiomatic of comedy is…the ability to recognize the normative lines of thought or expression” such that one can appreciate when these values are violated (Henkle, 1982, p.207). In this way, comedy’s ideal audience “retains refined assumptions about what is socially appropriate, decent, and ethical” (Henkle, 1982, p.209). As such, the sitcom form is rooted in “formalized and institutionalized humour,” which, as Longo asserts, “serves to preserve hegemonic order and corresponding hierarchical arrangements” (Longo, 2010, p.118-19). Early sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver largely ignored “the diversity of the American family in relation to race, gender, and other identities,” and production companies imbued such programs with plotlines that aligned with mass culture’s assumed ideologies (Pugh, 2018, p.8). People of colour were cast to minor or supporting roles that served purely comedic purposes, as if “their ethnicity was just one more running gag” as they deviated from the ‘ideal’ American identity, like the recurring indigenous tribesmen in Gilligan's Island (Spigel, 1992, p.154). This trend has undeniably outlived the country's once-sanctioned fascination with suburban quaintness. To laugh, then, would be to expose and entrench these values further (Longo, 2018). Per the nature of sitcom, it does not matter if we laugh or not—cue the laugh track, and these messages justify themselves. 

Here, assumptive norms are naturalized not by an unsuspecting audience, necessarily, but by those who deploy them. In a Pavlovian sense, canned laughter is the “relentless repetition of the unrepeatable” through which such humour is objectified (Adorno, 1972, p.79). To use R. Murray Schafer’s terms, its repetition turns laughter from a soundmark—that is, a culturally-contingent, unique sound—into laughter as a ubiquitous signal of what is acceptable and what is not (Schafer, 1994, p.10). Embedded in the sitcom’s diegesis, destined to be heard after each and every gag, the audience has no control over exposure unless they choose to turn off the television altogether. Here, the industry “exploits the cult of fact” by deploying the laugh track with “utmost exactitude to elevate it to the realm of facts” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2005, p.59). Whereas it is always an option for members of a live audience to heckle or express reproach to the rhetoric voiced on-stage, in watching a sitcom at home, the mass audience is inherently robbed of this option (Mills, 2009). This fact, I will clarify, is different from Žižek’s implication that the laugh track usurps laughter out of our mouths. Rather, it is the very nature of mass media that makes the average at-home individual a voiceless spectactor; radio and television audiences listen but cannot sound back, and such is the “silencing of reflection in the name of the illusory universality pervaded by the culture industry” (Adorno, 1972, p.11). Even if one should express reproach to an offensive joke from the comfort of their living room, the laugh track signifies that it has already been endorsed. Not only is this endorsement contagious, but its leverage over the audience imbues each joke with a sense of fact (Bachorowski & Owren, 2003, p.187). The laugh track is not, distinctly, the automization of the viewer’s reaction, but the overwhelming voice of the media-maker, laughing at his own joke.

The repercussions of the laugh track’s commingling with dominant ideologies are up for debate. Paul Krassner, for example, follows Adorno’s logic by referring to canned laughter as “the lowest form of facism” (Krassner, 1990, para.2). Brewer would disagree, likely due to the intensity of Krassner’s claim, and instead gesture to the lack of empirical evidence surrounding the ideological consequences of the laugh track, specifically (Brewer, 2018, pg.23). It is telling, nevertheless, that this ‘objective’ humour is still reiterated in contemporary sitcoms, even as the genre takes on new forms; consider this essay’s introductory passage from Friends, wherein the laugh track endorses Monica’s ‘fatness’ as a violation of traditional norms of femininity and prudence, objectifying such values through a seemingly benign chuckle. The survival of racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and otherwise unfunny comedy is, unfortunately, too plentiful a history to include in this essay alone.

I will conclude on an optimistic note: the gradual retirement of the laugh track signifies, perhaps, how modern television viewers have reconsidered silence to be the essence of subjectivity. The phenomenology of mass media has drastically changed since the early days of wireless communication—the days in which a disembodied voice evoked apprehension, the suburbs were prized as the ideal, and Adorno and Horkheimer lamented culture’s imminent fall from consciousness. As modern television viewers grow more and more complex—as detailed in Jason Mittell’s Complex TV—media scholars note the increased tolerance “for viewers to be confused, encouraging them to pay attention and put the pieces together themselves to comprehend the narrative” (Mittell, 2015, p.164). Accordingly, there has been a notable shift from the multicamera sitcom to the single-camera sitcom—consider The Office, Community, or Abbott Elementary—which scraps the laugh track and relies on finding humour in the minutiae. The retirement of the laugh track implies that sitcom jokes are now, more than ever, followed by silence, which is, in a modern context, “understood as a crucial dimension of an ideal, rational subject that is in control of the production of meaning” (Gautier, 2015, p.186). Just as recorded laughter served a host of acoustemological means, so too will silence in the pursuit of knowing ourselves and others. 

The contemporary television viewer’s disdain for the laugh track is somewhat warranted; recorded laughter cannot convince me that the banal puns in The Big Bang Theory are of a certain comedic merit, nor will its primal contagion cajole me into joining in on the chuckling through suggestion alone. Instead, this essay has demonstrated that recorded laughter is not laughter. To study recorded laughter through an acoustemological lens is to uncover the spatial, temporal, and ideological artifacts left in laughter’s wake. Once canned, it is not, simply, a laughing matter.

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[rubykarelia]

UNTITLED (poem in ISO by Long Xi Vlessing, 2021)

[rubykarelia]

L'ATELIER ROUGE (short story, horror, 2021)

“With the sugar lace?”

“Please, and the candy pearls,” Vivienne replied insistently. She perused the crisp laminated pages of wedding cakes that Miss Blossom had brought as samples. 

“And you said pink piping,” Miss Blossom mused as she sketched in her notebook as if she was da Vinci, the tiered buttercream her Vitruvian man. Blossom was the cake designer in Beverly Hills ever since Monsieur Sucré was disparaged after an E Coli outbreak at a Wilshire baby shower. 

“No, red,” Vivienne interjected. “Please.” 

“Red it is,” Blossom assured her. “And you’re sure we don’t need to call Mr. Beaumont to confirm?”

“No, he’s so busy,” Vivienne sighed, looking down at the mascarpone-frosted chantilly on page 10. “He’s been working late, taking on more cases. I’m sure he’ll appreciate any cake, as long as it’s not made of take-out Chinese.” 

“Oh, I promise—nothing of the sort!” Blossom laughed a little too hard. “Perhaps the two of you are saving for a nursery?” There was something saccharine in her voice, a presumptuous upturn to her lips sugaring her words.

Vivienne quickly lifted her eyes, furrowing her brow, confused. 

“Please forgive my romantic abandon,” Blossom back-pedalled. “I just 

know the two of you will have the most beautiful children.”  

Vivienne’s smile tempered, and the movement behind her eyes paused. “Do I look pregnant, Liza-Beth?” 

“No, Ms. Beaumont, please. I wasn’t insinuating—I’m sorry. I never should have said anything. Just my imagination.” Blossom recoiled.

“I tried on my mother’s gown last night,” she began, gazing down as if she was recalling a torment from ‘Nam, “and it wouldn’t fit in the stomach. It’s funny. My mother herself would tell me I should start pilates again. Or put me on a diet. No eating before dinner, no white foods, no drinkable calories.” 

Blossom’s mouth was frozen in a contrite grin. Vivienne could tell that she had nothing to say, maybe because she agreed that her stomach was swollen, and it was the first thing the woman had noticed when she had walked through the door. But Vivienne felt sure that she couldn’t be pregnant; Victor—or Mr. Beaumont as he was known around his office and oftentimes to close friends—hadn’t touched her in months. 

“I’m sure you’re quite busy, too, Ms. Beaumont, just like your fiancé. I’ll let you go. I’ll see you next week for a tasting.” 

Vivienne arose, smoothing the tweed fabric of her skirt with her manicured hands. 

“Thank you, Miss Blossom,” she smiled, “you’re truly a lifesaver.”

* * *

Vivienne swiftly swooped into her car, a gift from Elliott’s father. She set off for home, weaving through the cobbled veins of the wedding district and towards the honeymoon of Beverly Hills. She didn’t feel very well. She hated the way her stomach felt too intimate against the steering wheel, too comfortable bridging the waist of her underwear. She suddenly felt too big for the car, her coiffed hair grazing the sunroof, legs screaming from their tight dashboard chamber. Pearls of oily sweat began to puddle on her forehead and upper lip as if her body was trying to make even more of itself. She had to stop and reach for the silk scarf in her pocket and try to pare these new extremities, wipe herself away.

A dimly lit shop caught her eye from across the street. Its brick cladding was caked with city grime, and there was an unseasonal frost speckled on the window panes. L’Atelier Rouge, the awning read in a curly, barely-legible font. A headless mannequin stood proudly in the window, trussed in a shocking 22-inch-waist girdle. Vivienne strangely felt a twinge of jealousy, gazing at that fibreglass model. She killed the motor and decided she needed to go in. 

Inside L’Atelier Rouge was undoubtedly organised and thoughtfully ornamented but dusty, cramped. Each small surface—and there were many—had a film of yesterday, so concentrated in some places that it looked like ashes had been spread in the alcoves between skinny statues and lingerie racks. Curtains with parted red lips mounted bare brick walls, as if they were opening to some absurd theatre. Dress forms cliqued in beautiful armies of boasting breasts and feather boas. Even their limbs—though maimed like Greek statues that had weathered with age—were adorned in pearls and garter belts. They look beautiful, thought Vivienne, making a mental note. I’ll pick up a garter, too.

Vivienne saw no associates, feeling strangely impelled to ask a mannequin for assistance. She approached one of them, its waist wrung like a damp towel in a crimson corset. Her fingers unfurled and outstretched to the satin, tracing the strict architecture. She held the waist in both hands as if she was about to lead the form into some grand arabesque. The figure was so tiny that her fingers almost met at the small of its back.

“Welcome,” a voice said from behind her. Vivienne flinched and swivelled. She met the wired eyes of an older woman, thin and delicate. She had unnaturally vermeil hair that had been twisted into neat curls atop her wool blazer. She smiled somewhat knowingly, her thin lips painted in a severe ruby lacquer.

“Hi,” Vivienne rasped, clearing her throat.

“Mother Francine,” the woman extended her polished, ancient hand. “Welcome.” 

“Vivienne,” she replied. “Thank you.”

“That’s a vintage piece,” the woman explained. She wasn’t warning Vivienne against letting her hands wander—she was bragging. “Made in Paris in 1929, completely flawless. We restored the eyelets downstairs.” 

“It’s incredible,” Vivienne said earnestly, turning towards the mannequin once again. She could feel the woman’s eyes studying her. 

“Are you looking for something?” she asked. 

Vivienne paused. She wondered why the shop made her freeze up, unable to rehinge her jaw and exchange niceties like a normal patron. 

“Yes,” she finally admitted. She shook her head inwardly, scolding herself for being so awkward. “I am looking for something. I’m getting married next month.”

“And you’re looking for a husband?” 

Vivienne couldn’t move again, and confusion crept into her smile. The woman gave a guttural laugh—her throat seemed to process each sound through metal mesh. 

“I’m joking, my love,” she smiled. It wasn’t funny, but Vivienne aped along. “I’m sure your fiancé is marvellous. He sure does have good taste.” 

“I’m looking for a garter belt,” Vivienne confessed. “And a corset.” She almost wrapped her arms around her abdomen in a shameful embrace. The woman looked at her stomach anyway as if she noticed its prominence. 

“We’ll fix you right up,” she observed. 

* * *

“I think this one will suit your complexion, my dear,” Mother Francine said, carrying a cream corset in her arms like a small child. They had transitioned into the dressing room—a funhouse of mirrors and scarves and drapes. The lighting was nothing like the stringent temperature of a department store; it was honeyed and warm like her grandmother’s boudoir. She took off her blazer and blouse. “But first.” Mother Francine drew a measuring ribbon like a sheathed sword and stood behind her. 

The tape wrapped around her near-naked form. She watched as Mother Francine studied her body in the mirror, her lips miming silently in some sort of calculation. Vivienne could bear the looking but cringed as the tape tightened its grasp. She had to keep herself from jumping as Francine’s fingers pinched her abdomen for a quick second. 

“I’m a little bigger than I used to be,” she apologised instinctively. “I suppose I’ll need a larger size.” 

“No, no,” Mother Francine insisted. She swapped the tape for the corset and began the binding process. “They’re all small. No such thing as a large corset. You have to train yourself to wear them.” She began to fasten the lace with the same vigour as a protective mother securing her child’s seat belt. “Like a wild animal needs to be tamed. Your body is trying so hard to be big, but you tell her to be small, no matter what she says.” 

Finally, Mother Francine stepped back. Vivienne was surprised at how tight it was, how eerie that satin could serve as skin. Her hands found her hips, minding the exaggerated dips. 

“Wow,” Vivienne laughed proudly. “I look like a question mark.” Mother Francine laughed and called her colourful. 

Vivienne put a hand on her stomach and wondered where it went. For a moment, she lifted her palm to where it used to protrude—it was strange to feel air where skin was meant to be. She couldn’t suppress her smile. 

Suddenly, a small man entered. Vivienne gasped and hugged her torso, now scant in both clothing and volume. She’d never felt so naked and small—she wondered if such words meant the same thing.

“Oh, child, I’m sorry,” Mother Francine sighed. “This is my son, Silas.” Though he had to be in his mid-forties, something about Silas was small, childlike, maybe even naive; he was short, and his suit draped off of his extremities like there had been a mix-up at the dry cleaners. Vivienne released herself and gathered her composure. 

“Oh, wonderful,” she remarked. “How do you do?”

“He’s on vocal rest. All that singing.” 

“How cool,” Vivienne smiled. Silas reciprocated with a closed-lip grin and handed his mother a garter belt. 

“Marvellous,” Mother Francine sighed. “Silas, doesn’t Miss Vivienne look beautiful?” He nodded three times, his eyes staying on Vivienne’s, as if his accordance was choreographed. 

“Thank you so much. I love it.” Vivienne couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. 

“My pleasure. Perhaps you can return soon with your gown and try the entire ensemble,” Mother Francine rasped. “But before you go, I’d be remiss if I didn’t show you the museum.” 

The three walked down a dark set of stairs leading to the basement of L’Atelier Rouge. Mother Francine flicked a switch and the room ignited with spotlights, revealing an array of dress forms. Each was adorned in an intricate, vintage piece, manned by an engraved plaque. 

“Wow,” Vivienne mused, still cinched in her corset. “This is incredible.” 

“It’s been a lifelong passion of mine and Father Frances, my husband,” Mother Francine contended. “He labours each day away in the workshop, right over there.” Her finger gestured towards a wooden door. White light gleamed beyond its cracks. “Lacing, sewing, boning.” 

“Boning?” Vivienne asked. 

“The structures that keep you nice and conformed, dear,” Mother Francine replied. “Come, come. Look at this. It’s a nineteenth-century.” Before them was a Victorian piece made of gilded brocade. Vivienne always thought that something so old would have to be in black and white, but it was in mint condition, its colours still gleaming and gems winking at her as she admired its arches. “They used whalebones, see, to maintain the shape.”

“A skeleton into a skeleton,” Vivienne mused before she could catch her words. 

“Yes,” Mother Francine attested with a smile Vivienne had never seen before. “And look here, child.” She motioned Vivienne and her son—who followed in a seemingly conditioned obedience—towards another piece in her collection. The plaque read Agnes Sorel Cotte in Linen, mcdl. It was an enchanting peach hue—the same that Vivienne often tried to replicate on her cheeks. She couldn’t help but admire the impossible waist, how it made her sympathise for the mannequin’s nonexistent spine. But what struck out to her the most was the circumstance of brown lining each armpit—the vestiges of ancient blood. 

“It’s a French cut from the 1400’s. A lower neckline and the smallest waist of its time,” Mother Francine explained. “Twenty inches.”

“Goodness,” Vivienne puffed. She decided not to mention the stains.

“Of course, one can really go as small as they’d like. As I said, it’s manipulation. We’ve got you at a twenty-four, but we certainly could get to a twenty if you so desired.”

 “Do you get many customers with such a request?” Vivienne gasped. 

“Everyone wants it, but no one wants to admit it,” Mother Francine lamented. Turning to Vivienne, she unbuttoned her blazer, and then revealed her own torso. 

Her grey skin folded over the top and out from under a white corset dripping in straps and laces of all sorts. Her bosom was pruned and translucent, and below, the garment cinched her middle to a disconcerting size. Vivienne knew she had necklaces that reached a larger circumference. The valleys of her hips were defined and angular; unlike the soft arches of a question mark, Mother Francine pinched in at the waist like an ampersand.

Vivienne’s eyes opened fully, bracing for the woman to snap like a sawn redwood. But Mother Francine stood tall, her posture unflinching. It was as if the corset kept her from doubling over, serving more as a splint than a saw. 

“Eighteen,” she stated plainly, then continued with a smile that showed her yellow teeth, “at eighty-one.” 

The sight left Vivienne uneasy but ultimately besotted. She decided that Mother Francine was someone they should make books about, make movies about. She felt proud to have met her, better for it in some way. She supposed Francine was merely a committed saleswoman, too, trussing herself in her own garments to demonstrate their efficacy. And she did, of course, make the sale; upstairs, Vivienne paid for her garter belt and vowed to return on Friday with her mother’s gown. 

“Thank you,” she said to Mother Francine, “you’re a lifesaver.”

* * *

That night, tucked in the eggshell nook of her walk-in closet, Vivienne tried on her mother’s gown once again. It still refused to zip shut in the back. She grew frustrated—she couldn’t contort her arms to reach the zipper anyhow, and Victor wasn’t home to help. For a few moments, she missed the confinement of the corset she wore earlier, the uncomfortable but cosy captivity in linen and lace. 

When Friday came, Vivienne treated her appointment at L’Atelier Rouge with as much professionalism as an actress attending a dress rehearsal. She woke up earlier than required—abiding by an imagined call-time—folded her mother’s gown into a garment bag, waxed her underarms, and arranged her hair into the same updo of ringlets she planned to replicate for the wedding. 

* * *

“Twenty-two,” Mother Francine celebrated as she stepped away from behind her customer. Vivienne smiled and felt her own curves with a loving hand. Once again, they were in the mirrored dressing room—there was plenty to look at, but Vivienne’s wide eyes remained fixed upon herself. 

“Twenty-two,” Vivienne sighed. It hurt, of course, but numbed her ever so slightly in a way that she found almost pleasurable. 

“I’ll leave you to put on your gown, dear,” Mother Francine croaked, “I’m sure I have a veil somewhere in the workshop. I’ll retrieve it, and then we can show Father Frances. He examines all of the garments—makes sure they work.” 

Vivienne couldn’t look away from the mirror. There was a sentiment in her grin that only came out at charity galas and Christmas time. “Fabulous.”

She peeled the cream charmeuse out of the bag and stepped into it. Pulling it over her shoulders like a pair of suspenders, Vivienne rejoiced. She could just tell it was going to fit. 

Silas appeared as if sensing that Vivienne would need a hand. 

“Oh, hello, Silas,” she smiled, “Could you help me zip?” The timid fellow followed the command dutifully and delicately as if Vivienne was made of china. 

“Pretty, don’t you think?” Silas nodded in agreement. “It’s my mother’s. She passed away just last February. I miss her plenty. It’s nice you get to work with your parents.” He stayed still.

“So, she says you’re quite the singer,” Vivienne remarked. She couldn’t stop letting words tumble out of her open mouth—it was as if that cinching feeling in her abdomen was slowly inching up to her throat. Silas offered a soft smile of assurance. “Could you sing something for me?”  

His smile bowed and his eyebrows knit together in confusion as if his mother had never mentioned his vocal rest. 

After a few moments, his lips pursed inward and he shut his eyes. Vivienne recognised this face as apologetic—the same look she assumed when her mother chastised her for cheating on her spelling test in the second grade. Silas reached for the buttons on his blazer and began to unbutton them one-by-one. 

Silas was bound in the narrowest girdle Vivienne had ever seen. She didn’t know a man’s body was able to move that way, but figured such stiff, unyielding boning had been holding him in for quite some time. The condition of the piece was so poor that it quickly eliminated any allusions to sensuality; it was covered in seagreen mold and other mysterious stains, a crimson shade pooling on its edges and hardware. The lace wasn’t lace but cord—the braided polypropylene twine that Vivienne had only ever seen wrapped around Christmas trees to keep them on top of car roofs. This was not lingerie, but a cage. What was it trying to keep inside?

She froze for a long minute, a hand to her mouth. “Can you take it off?” she finally mustered. 

To her surprise, Silas began to untether the cord. But when he took off the girdle, his body didn’t reset. He was forever indented. His torso was a greenish grey, wrinkled and creased as if it had pruned underwater. He had permanent bruises casting shadows on his ribs which were now recoiling into his chest. And on his sides were distinct punctures where the laces and hardware had broken skin. Some of the holes were lined in both crimson and ash—Vivienne recognised them as cigarette burns, especially the ones that left the linen and blemished his collarbones and shoulders. Some wounds weren’t as sympathetic than those that still blushed: a patch, just below where his heart should’ve been, was black as night. Vivienne couldn’t move, but if she were able to, she would’ve cringed from the scent—a coppery cocktail of mold and dried blood. 

Suddenly, Silas resealed himself in his layers. He had heard his mother traipse back into the dressing room, proudly carrying a lace veil.

“How beautiful,” she said to Vivienne, still immobile, “you’re almost done.”

She placed the veil on Vivienne’s head, her eyes now obscured by its intricate weave. Silas stood plainly in the corner and resumed his habitual complacency. He was a great actor.

“Now, we must go see Father Frances.” Before Vivienne could gather her words, Mother Francine had grabbed her hand and led her towards the basement. 

The procession down the stairs and into the museum had the frills of a wedding but the solemnity of a death march. Vivienne could not close her mouth nor eyes; neither were working very well. Her hand hurt, her skin woven between Mother’s skeletal fingers. And her stomach hurt, too, collapsed under steel and charmeuse. 

She found herself outside of the wooden workshop door. Mother Francine primped each detail of Vivienne’s ensemble—she adjusted her veil, ringlets, and breasts as they expelled from her chest. 

Behind her, the workshop door creaked open with a grumble. Still frozen, Vivienne managed to employ her neck—she met a stout man with dishevelled, greasy hair and a lit cigarette hanging loosely from his lips. He wore an apron spotted with so many stains that it appeared as if a Rorschach test was painted on his protruding gut. Sitting atop his wiry moustache, a pair of thick glasses magnified the vacancy of the man’s watching eyes.

“Father Frances,” Mother Francine called. “This is Vivienne, the bride.” Father Frances merely grunted in acknowledgement. “How does she look?”

The man situated himself before her and scanned her entirety. There was a tinge to his gaze that Vivienne couldn’t help but identify as disgust. Before she knew it, a salty tear fell onto her painted lip. 

“I’m considering not wearing a corset at all, anymore,” she muttered nervously, “I’m not feeling very well.” 

Mother Francine furrowed her brow. “Cold feet. That’s normal.” Father Francine, now behind her, wrapped a hand around her waist, inspecting his work. 

“Tighter,” he croaked to his wife. Vivienne was aquiver and tried to still herself, though this effort only made her tremble all the more. 

“It hurts,” she tried, knowing the complaint would be left unheard. 

His hand still on her stomach, Father Frances paused, then lifted his eyes to Mother. 

“Mother,” he rasped, “Feel this.” 

The old woman pursed her puckered lips in concern and extended a hand to Vivienne’s abdomen. “Quickening.” It was then that Vivienne could feel it too—the unmistakable clamber of life as it writhed below her humming heart. 

“Tighter,” Father Frances insisted once again, and he pulled the reins of the corset with such force that everything went black. 

* * *

Vivienne barely awoke, folded in a dank recess of the workshop. Her lungs and lips laboured to lap at the air in arrhythmic gasps. She tried to unleash a scream, but no sound emerged. With her eyes beginning to adapt to the stringent light of the workshop, Vivienne noticed blood pooling beneath her. She moved her hands to her hips, still clothed in the corset and her mother’s gown. So much of her was gone. 

In fact, the quarter was littered with discarded dresses, each sequinned with a distinct iteration of sparkle. She thought she saw the ruby of a ballroom, the bubblegum pink of a sweet sixteen, the magenta of a quinceañera.

Vivienne was weak, unmoving. Her vision began to thin into a new obsidian. Before her, Father Frances played a discordant lullaby as he worked. His instrument was an industrial file and a milky rib that he pared into punctuation.

[rubykarelia]

THE ARSONIST (short story, comedy, 2022)

When Blythe was Sal’s best friend, he loved to introduce her that way. There was something so special in knowing that someone met the requirements of the ‘best friend’ title and felt comfortable using it on him, too. No one else ever had. Nowadays, if you were to ask, Sal’d probably say that his Nana is his best friend. If he’s feeling generous, he’ll throw in Alyssa from work, who’s only a true contender on the days she buys eclairs for the whole office or compliments his shoes. But, for a long time, there was no doubt about Blythe. Even on the night they met back in college, Sal was somehow already so sure that Blythe would be his best friend for the rest of his life. He could’ve professed it right there and then, in that crooked bathroom line-up of a downtown haunt, where the ground was sticky, and it smelled like battery acid, that there had been a name written in his fate, one he had never been able to read, but suddenly, for whatever reason, he felt so clear that that name was hers. He was wrong, of course. 

Blythe was a softy, and everyone seemed to know it—especially her. She was a self-diagnosed empath. Sal didn’t know what this meant, but upon a cursory Google search he learned that an empath tries to fit into other people’s shoes as often as she can. Blythe wore other people’s shoes more often than her own, it seemed. She had big dreams of anonymously donating hospital wings, and she often posted photos of herself without makeup on in a self-proclaimed pursuit to ‘inspire other women to embrace their natural beauty.’ She gave her leftovers to the homeless people outside of their favourite restaurants, retweeted links to GoFundMe pages for the underprivileged. Sal didn’t admit it to himself until later on, but his favourite charity she ever donated to was him. Her presence felt precious, made him feel valuable in turn. She offered pithy sentiments whenever Sal confided in her about something that was bothering him—the fear of being alone, mostly—and when he cried, she frowned, lips aquiver, glossy-eyed, bowing her brows to her side bangs. 

The incident, as it were, happened last November. It was Thursday, and Blythe and Sal were on the scenic route to work, strolling down a street off of Canal with baked goods and coffee in hand, scarves tucked into sherpa coats. They walked to their respective offices together every day. It was a talent that the pair were always able to weave their commutes together like a French braid—regardless of where either worked, they always seemed to meet in the middle. At the time, Sal was a Business Development Associate for a Manhattan furniture designer, and Blythe was the Social Media Manager for a wellness podcast. It was a remote job, but she rented a space a couple blocks from Sal, and that’s where she did all of her work.

They’d stopped for lattes at one of their favourite shops. Because of that acerbic New York chill sneaking in through the door, the entire store was nice and foggy. Sal always loved that winter couldn’t change the bakery’s eternal summer, when the inside air got warm and heavy with yeast and sugar. The condensation was especially thick that Thursday; Sal couldn’t even see through the display case, return the sentiment to the croissants smiling up at him.

Blythe asked him what he’d done the day before. He had gone on a date with a guy named Lucas but decided quickly that it would be their last encounter. Lucas had spent too much of the meal talking about how cool his big brother is.

“I don’t think I should keep using these dating apps,” Sal moaned to Blythe. “These guys I match with are so boring. I would be humiliated if one of them murdered me. If someone murdered me, I’d at least want him to be interesting.”

“It’s cool that Lucas’s big brother is training for the marathon, though.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Sal eyed each baked good as if he was a detective behind a two-way mirror—he loved taking breakfast seriously. “By the way,” he continued. “Have you seen that new thing on Netflix? The docuseries? I was gonna save it for Sunday, but I couldn’t sleep last night and needed to watch something.” On Sunday evenings, Sal would go over to Blythe’s apartment, and they’d watch something scary while cuddling up under a big duvet. He loved cuddling her and that she cuddled back.

“Which one?”

“It’s about this psychopath who kills his parents for their life insurance.”

“Oh, no, I haven’t seen that one yet. No spoilers.”

“It’s meh,” he observed. “And—I know you’ll understand—I find it so corny when they turn it around at the end of a documentary, and the guy getting interviewed looks at the camera and asks the audience something like, ‘Is the murderer to blame, or are we all to blame?’” Blythe rolled her eyes knowingly—cheesy film clichés were among the many cherished faux-pas that they collected to complain about together. Their best times were spent commiserating. He admired that Blythe could always pinpoint exactly what to hate and why.

“The aunt gave an interview, though,” he continued. “She was so cute and old, and she reminded me of my Nana. She was so, so sad. It was tragic.”

“I just wish these shows would show more reenactments,” Blythe remarked. “I think I’m one of those people with that condition where you can’t conjure pictures in your mind. Picture an apple. Do you see an apple?”

Sal closed his eyes and thought about an apple. He quickly decided—as if there was a strict invigilator supervising his mind’s eye—that the apple was red, a fuji. Pristine, plump. No bites. Waxy. 

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes still shut. “A fuji.” 

Blythe didn’t reply. He opened his eyes, and she was busy ogling the pecan tarts through the foggy glass. 

“What about the fuji?” he asked.

“I can’t just hear stories from interviews, I need to see it all happening. Especially the crime. I hate it when they rely on interviews to tell the story. Like, hello? Actors exist. Do a reenactment, for god’s sake.”

“You want to see the murder?” laughed Sal, shuffling forward in the lineup.

“Yes,” she answered. Her voice was dampened by the strange cocktail that Sal had learned to expect of her tongue: acrid, bitter, somehow sweet.

Sure, Blythe was an empath, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t joke about dark things. Her sardonic side wrapped all the way around. Not many people could crack through such an exterior and understand it as wit. 

“That’s so messed up.” Sal forced out a snort. “Don’t worry, I’ll get your latte.”

“It’s just so interesting to me, you know? How could a person do something like that? Kill someone?”

“Ouch!” Sal’s hand sizzled when he reached for his latte. “Careful. Grab a cozy for your cup.” He winced and held his right hand with his left.

“Oh, Sally!” Blythe kissed his scalded hand, her lips leaving a burgundy print on the ripe skin. “Poor baby.” Sal smiled as she took over for his left hand.

They’d just stepped outside when they found themselves inadvertently joining a puddle of onlookers. The crowd was murmuring to one another, and Sal immediately sensed the despondent weight of their whispers. Blythe lit a cigarette and sipped it along with her coffee. She nursed the hot latte slowly—she always took a long time drinking so as not to smudge her lipstick.

“Holy shit,” Sal said, interrupting Blythe. She had been insistently retelling the previous weekend’s festivities like it was sacred lore. She held out the cigarette to him, probably thinking he had asked for a puff. 

“Look over there,” he clarified.

A motorcyclist was frozen on the ground, draped upon his fallen steed as if he was lolling on a beach chair. Passengers had fled an adjacent M15 bus—a headlight was all smashed. The driver was shouting obscenities at the unconscious biker, flailing his arms.

“Oh god,” said Blythe. “This is a lot.”

“One day, you’re just going to work, riding your scooter. Next…” Sal shook his head, taking off his baseball cap to pay his respects. It started off as such a normal day, Sal lamented. That’s how most true crime documentaries like to preface tragedy, with a plea for the audience to trust in the morning’s banality.

“I’m so emotionally congested right now,” Blythe rasped. “I don’t know if I can handle this today.” She drank from her cup but squealed as the hot coffee touched her tongue.

“Have you eaten yet? Have some muffin,” Sal suggested, keeping one eye on the crash. He couldn’t stop looking at the body, all limp and twisted, not like a body at all yet still, tragically, human. 

“Is anyone calling 911? Like, anyone?” he called out, looking around at the crowd accusingly. “Maybe someone knows CPR?”

“It’s too late for CPR.”

“How do we know that?”

“I don’t know. I forgot to mention,” Blythe mused. “Hailey was there on Saturday. Bleh.” She contorted her face as if she’d tasted something horrible. She laughed with herself—it sounded half-hollow, as though she thought Sal would join in and fill the gaps she left in her breaths. He turned to her, mouth agape, eyes still dilated in disbelief at the fallen biker. She still wasn’t done. 

“And she hasn’t seen Ash since the breakup, which we all know, so it’s incredibly awkward. She was obviously so timid and out of place, and she kept asking me for a sip of my drink or a cigarette, which you know I hate. I think she was nervous. And I’m still annoyed, right, because I keep telling Noah to, you know, phase her out of this friend group. It's the nice thing to do. For her sake and our sakes. Like, just stop inviting her…”

Sal felt his heart do an unfunny rimshot in his chest. Her droning started to hurt his ears and then every inch of his body, impairing each sense, like when a sound is so loud you can’t see what’s in front of you, or when a light is so bright you can’t hear the world anymore.

“I’m so surprised you can even think about anything else right now.” Sal couldn’t soften his exasperated expression. He hated confrontation of any kind, but this was a life-or-death situation, he decided. “We basically just watched someone die, and you're still talking about Saturday.”

It was the first time in which Sal consciously wished Blythe would go away, continue the commute without him. This sensation was foreign to him—he always hated being away from her. Sal always dreaded the Uber rides home from her apartment: the lonely backseat, the awkward silence, the theatrics of a passing skyline. And he always cursed the tragic early morning of each Saturday night when the club closed, and Blythe had run off with a handsome stranger, and Sal had to baste in the cold, silent dark of his studio apartment where coming down from their chosen high reached a new profundity. He hated saying goodbye when she had come for just a quick visit, and he'd have to stand at his lobby door and watch her clop down his stoop, spill onto the sidewalk and disappear. Each time, he’d shut the door and think of her, miss her in a way that felt like mourning. Sal didn’t mind being alone, but he hated being alone without her.

“I’m sorry I’m not processing the trauma the way you think I should.” Blythe still didn’t get it, which was made clear by a defensive twitch to her eyebrow. Her face never moved too much, but she still managed to be hauntingly expressive.

Sal felt conflicted as to where his eyes should look—the fallen motorcyclist or the best friend. Both appeared wounded. Thankfully, sirens sounded, and Sal craned his neck towards an incoming blitzkrieg of ambulances and flashing lights. Emergency workers emerged from their vehicles, rushing to their tiny missions, intuiting where they were most useful—it was like a carefully choreographed ballet. He almost considered asking them if he could be of any assistance. They might have been able to use his scarf as a tourniquet, or maybe they needed an extra man on tourist detail.

“God, this is brutal. It looks like that time at Coachella when that guy got stabbed,” Sal gasped. Some onlookers left, probably late for work, but, in classic Manhattan fashion, the empty spots were quickly preempted by looky-loos. There was an audible, collective whimper from the crowd when the bus driver’s head fell in his hands—some type of concession statement. Sal couldn’t watch any longer; he crouched down in disgust, making the cold dregs of his coffee spill a little, and his heavy sighs formed clouds in the cold.

“God.” He looked up to Blythe. Her eyes were fixed on the bus driver. 

“Look at him crying. His life has changed forever.” She scoffed, unfunny, and took a careful sip of her latte.

“His life’s changed forever? I mean, this guy’s dead.” He stood up, exerting a pout as his eyes found the man again. “This is too much, I mean.” He put his cap over his eyes and tried to cry because he felt like it.

“Are you mad at me? I feel like you are.”

“No, why?” Sal asked from behind his cap.

“Nevermind,” Blythe surrendered. Sal’s stomach twitched—he wondered if his answer would've passed a polygraph test. Blythe's brand of empathy meant that she could always tell when Sal was lying, how he was feeling, how she could make it better. He began to wonder if this was because everyone else’s ailments were so much more exciting than her own. Once, after the pair had seen an indie movie about a little paraplegic girl, she spent all afternoon walking around with a slight limp. At the time, he thought it was endearing. The image—Blythe clutching his arm as they stumbled out of the mall movie theatre—flashed in his head as he watched her brow nest into its comfortable furrow, and she was no longer endearing, but heavy. Too much of not at all.

“Sal,” she erupted. “Sal, look, he’s alive!” 

He emerged to the sight of an EMT hooking an arm around the biker, guiding him back onto his feet. He was groggy, and his leg looked a bit mangled, but he was moving.

Sal instinctively began to cheer, clapping his hands and whooping.

“That’s enough!” a police officer barked in their direction. Sal’s celebrations were premature, and EMTs leered at him, but he didn’t care about anything else other than the man and his beating heart. He threw his cap in the air like it was a graduation.

Sal’s cap fell from the sky, right towards Blythe's cup. The onlookers, who’d begun resuming their commutes, stopped abruptly as the cardboard cup cracked loudly upon impact. Shrapnel of soy milk sprayed in every direction but only grazed the close bystanders—a teardrop of latte landed on Sal’s cheek—as most of the liquid coated Blythe’s hand. For a moment, Sal silently mourned the staining of his designer baseball cap, but then Blythe shrieked in pain.

“What the fuck!” she screamed. Her hand turned a fiery shade of red, and as Sal reached for it, she swung it away in a panic. He tried to say something that would comfort her, assure her that it’d be alright, but she kept crying dry tears, looking around for someone to care.

Some onlookers outstretched napkins. Sal grabbed a few and wrapped them around Blythe’s wound, and she let out a cry as the paper made contact with the fresh blister on the back of her hand.

“Should I get an Uber to the hospital?” 

“No!” she insisted. “You’ve done enough.”

Stray ambulances that had come for the motorcycle man began peeling away from the main street. Blythe waved one of them down before it could hurl away towards another damsel—when an ambulance stopped, she hopped in like she was ducking into a cab, not before she looked Sal’s way, shaking her head, eyebrows bowing to one another.

As the ambulance turned on its siren and hurried away, Sal was lost in a perplexed daze. What did she mean by that, ‘You’ve done enough’? His aimless gaze suddenly focused on the bus driver, explaining the incident to an officer, smiling to himself because he hadn’t killed anybody.

As Sal walked on, he texted Blythe, but she never replied. When he got to work, he discovered she’d posted an Instagram picture of her bandages from the emergency room, and underneath, she was replying to her followers’ niceties with pink hearts. By lunchtime, he went to check the comments again but couldn’t access her page—‘User Not Found’, it said. He knew Blythe, so he also knew it was likely she’d blocked him. She was constantly blocking or reporting people—it was usually done in good fun and without much of a motive, like that time she blocked a girl who didn’t invite her to her 12th birthday party years back. He couldn’t surrender to the possibility just yet.

He checked to see if her page had just been deleted, because she did social media cleanses often, especially when she was emotionally backed-up. Sal logged into another Instagram account on his laptop, which he had snuck into the office bathroom. Blythe was public, still alive, but wounded. She was taking to her Story to respond to any inquiries. Sal could barely listen to her, because it was so too strange to hear Blythe’s voice tell lies—her usual rasp was once so raw, but now it sounded like she needed to clear her throat of phlegm. He started pacing in and out of the stalls.

“I’m trying to process what just happened. Without going into specifics,” Blythe explained. “My friend—now ex-friend, I guess—poured hot coffee on me, and I had to go to the emergency room for a first-degree burn.” Sal had to Google whether first-degree burns were the worst kind—he always got them confused—and even though they turned out to be the most benign, she punctuated the medical jargon with urgency as if she was terminal.

Immediately, Sal was a pariah. Blythe stopped inviting him to things—that Sunday, he waited for his phone to buzz for an invitation to movie night, but it never did. On the eve of his upcoming dinner party, most of his guests sent him cancellation messages. Each had plucked from a jar of banal excuses: some were sick, some were working early the next morning, and everyone was so sorry that they couldn’t make it. They had scrutable alibis, but Sal felt strongly that the coffee spillage was a possible motive. It was a lonely process, being phased out.

Blythe texted Sal a few months later. She didn’t say anything about the coffee incident, just admitted that she missed him and needed the name of that dermatologist he’d recommended last April. Sal knew that was probably quite hard for her to do—and he felt bad for gatekeeping Dr. Hyun from a prospective patient—but he kept her number unsaved and never replied. 

“So, yeah,” Sal sighs. “That’s what really happened. I’m only telling you this because I know we have friends in common, and I wouldn’t want you to hear about it from anyone else.”

“I understand.”

“Anyways, it’s been pretty weird, so I redownloaded Hinge, and voila, here we are.” Sal stirs the ice in his coffee with a straw. “I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Javier.”

“Right. What was your major again?”

[rubykarelia]

RERUNNING: A History of the Sitcom Genre’s Resonance In the Queer Conscience (media analysis, 2022)

The concept of the queer icon is ambivalent and underresearched—nonetheless, such an epithet finds itself attached to countless figures, including those who identify as heterosexual or originate from seemingly low-brow forms of media such as the sitcom. In fact, the sitcom genre has produced countless fictional characters that, while straight, speak to a queer audience and inspire identification—consider Rose Nylund of Golden Girls, Fran Fine of The Nanny, and Valerie Cherish of The Comeback. It seems strange, in this way, that a fixture of queer identification may only be implicitly queer, especially if it operates within the fictitious and proverbially white-picket walls of the American television sitcom. 

In this essay, I employ media history, queer theory, and anecdotal evidence to respond to this quandary: the sitcom, with its roots in vaudeville and camp humour, has transformed into a legitimate site for queer identification. First, I will give an historical account of how the televised situational comedy came to be—I trace the genre back to vaudeville and, subsequently, the development of camp humour. In delineating the sitcom’s features—family, camp, and ephemera, specifically—I argue that it is an effective vehicle for transgenerational queer identification. At a general level, I will consider how even the most patriarchally-informed feature of the sitcom that has survived in the contemporary context—the focal point on the family—can inspire meaningful ephemeral viewing experiences among queer communities. I then assert that sitcoms appeal to Dyer’s notion of gay sensibility and can thus incite identification in their understanding of queer semiotics. However, through ephemeral evidence, we witness how, in reality, the self-identification and comfort that queer folks garner from sitcoms is a distinctly individual triumph. 

Considering the genre’s roots in mid-twentieth century America, it is often contended by scholars and passive television viewers alike that the sitcom is merely a theatrical reproduction of traditional patriarchal projections of that era. Historically, this is an objective truth, and it should be acknowledged before examining the genre’s interaction with queer culture. In this precursory section, I will delineate the burgeoning cult of nuclear domesticity that informed the sitcom genre before considering its subversive potential. Problematically, as the television set entered the new suburban homes of the 1950s, the reigning projections of white-picket innocence saw the technology as an “instrument of social sanitation” (Dreamhouse, 35). The emerging sitcom, an opportunity for the entire family to come together, idealised familial unity but nonetheless upheld the social functions of each member in the traditional nuclear structure (Make Room, 37). Moreover, in 1952, the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters gave credence to concerned religious groups that worried that any sexuality on-screen would “turn children into…sexually ‘perverse’ adults” (Make Room, 54). The sitcom—consider Ozzy and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver—was thus a revolving door of impermeable images of familial bliss, communality, and wholesomeness, and any identities “excluded by the normative assumption of suburban whiteness” were mocked or altogether excluded from the on-screen realm (Pugh, 8). Considering this impetus of hegemonic heterosexuality into the mass media, it is difficult to fathom that characters born from this tradition have been renowned as champions of the queer experience. 

However, I wish now to more intricately examine the potentially subversive features of the sitcom that align with queer tradition and thus inspire identification and empowerment. In these next sections, I will consider the sitcom’s depiction of family as well as its indebtedness to vaudeville and thus its inchoate connection to camp humour.

Indeed, as I have touched upon, the traditional sitcom used the emblem of family to assuage post-war anxieties concerning heterogeneity. Even in sitcoms such as Cheers or Friends that depict an atypical family structure, characters are in many ways nuclear-structured or aspirationally so, with white, middle-class leads giving viewers a sense of ‘normalcy’ in their respective heterosexual couplings. While these ‘surrogate families’ may be as homogenous as, say, Ozzy and Harriet Nelson, sitcoms that feature “non-normative or chosen families” offer queer viewers identification within the unexpected structures presented on-screen (Castiglia and Reed, 161). The concept of the on-screen chosen family is decidedly reflective of the queer chosen family, an inherently interpretive concept that is highly specific to the queer individual. The queer chosen family—also referred to as a fictive or intentional family—is an organised network that provides “social and instrumental support in a reciprocal and voluntary manner” (Muraco, 1314). Castiglia and Reed draw parallels between the on-screen family—especially that which is non-normative—and the fictive family; they are “increasingly self-motivated, collectively maintained forms of affiliation” (Castiglia and Reed, 161). Besides representation on-screen, sitcoms and mass media at large “allow audiences to share intimacy without familiarity and to create new memories,” which may offer an affective appeal for the queer individual that may be experiencing familial exclusion or disownment in the off-screen realm. (Castiglia and Reed, 162). In my discussion on the sitcom and queer ephemera, I provide further anecdotal examples in which queer individuals have formed fictive yet meaningful bonds with sitcom characters and have resonated with these on-screen chosen families.

Next, I turn towards vaudeville—an entertainment form that inspired the sitcom’s theatrical setup—to further situate the sitcom’s legitimacy in the queer ephemera. Characterised by its “wild spontaneity” and ability to “[rouse] the audience to excitement and directly [engage] their participation in the events on stage,” the vaudeville aesthetic and its bombastic comedy form was most commonly associated with the comedian Milton Berle (Make Room, 144). The formation of the vaudeville industry was greatly indebted to “‘working-class performers of particular ethnic backgrounds’” like Berle, who was of Jewish descent  (Murray qtd in Miller, 35). Berle and other variety performers of his ilk deployed “sexual innuendos and wild physical humour” in their acts (Miller, 35; Make Room, 144). These features—those that decidedly detached from the reigning “racist, segragationist, white supremacist culture” —were later sanitised in the development of the situational comedy (Miller, 36).  Here, the genre was a compromise in that it fused the controversial elements of vaudevillian humour with the “more genteel” aspects of theatrical realism (Make Room, 144). Nevertheless, vestiges of vaudeville are embedded in the genre’s contemporary iterations. In fact, vaudeville was the harbinger of today’s modern conception of camp humour. 

It must be acknowledged, however, that while vaudeville’s indebtedness to non-white performers  may read superficially as an early triumph in representation, like the early sitcom, the genre was, and is, inseparable from America’s sexist, racist, and imperalist roots. Per Quinlan Miller, much of the success of such performers relied on “playing up ethnicity” or, in fact, the ethnicity of others—the comedic form coexisted with black minstrelsy and blackface shows (35). Moreover, female vaudeville stars such as Eva Tanguay and a young Mae West were forced to navigate the era’s sexual codes and standards, the former “containing her threat” by “rechanelling the transgressiveness of burlesque through the grotesque” (my emphasis; Robertson, 59). Like Miller, I contend that “queer representation came later,” especially through ephemeral resonance, a factor I will more comprehensively explore in my final sections (Miller, 2). Indeed, much like most facets of American culture, the sitcom—now commonly considered a benchmark of white, heteronormativity—relied on early disenfranchised comedians and “mixed performance traditions through invigorated camp practices” (45). This is not to say that pioneers of the genre—other than the contemptuous whites in blackface—have not, in retrospect, propagated a comedic form that has provided a wide demographic of queer folks with representative semiotics and a mode of self-identification.

Here, I will more comprehensively compare vaudeville to camp. To begin, I must draw upon multiple scholars’ respective concepts of the phenomenon. Muñoz defines camp as a strategic response, one that counters “‘the breakdown of representation that occurs when a queer, ethnically marked, or other subject encounters [their] inability to fit within the majoritarian representational regime’” (qtd in Miller, 61). Non-conformity is the earmark of vaudeville—not only did the vaudeville industry rely on ethnic performances that proved acerbic to a prevailing white culture, but its style of humour was founded upon the act of “‘speaking back’” (Becker and Desjardins qtd in Miller, 46). Vaudeville humour was, above all, everything that twentieth century media would later censor. It was satirical, confrontational, quippy, and unconventional, much like camp. 

Notably, Dyer’s concept of gay sensibility—though it is distinguished from camp by other scholars—alludes to the inherent nexus between vaudeville and camp humour. Gay sensibility “‘holds together qualities that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and authenticity[,] . . .intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a deprecating sense of its absurdity’” (qtd in Cooper, 515). Many argue that drag performances are the supreme embodiment of this concept. In early vaudeville, Berle wrote and perform in multiple cross-dressing skits that attempted to shock the audience as he donned women’s clothing. Rather than violating norms for the sake of a laugh, other early vaudeville performers more effectively parodied sexual respectability and the rigidity of the gender binary. Kitty Doner, a female male impersonator, dexterously changed into drag on-stage to portray gender as performance; other than wearing masculine costuming, she assumed a distinctly unladylike and sardonic wit. Further cultural and media pundits reiterate this idea of wrongness—Miller argues that camp is “classic comedy by way of incongruity” (Miller, 43). The ‘wrong attachment’ theories associated with camp and gay sensibility echo the historical conception of vaudeville; essentially, each concept involves finding joy and humour in the seemingly antithetical (Lecture 5). 

Consider Mae West, a common fixture in queer iconography not least for her contributions to both vaudeville and camp culture. A young Mae West gained notoriety in the vaudeville scene for her “transgressively sexual song-and-dance style,” one that exageratted her feminine persona to construct a “deliberate and ironic female masquerade” (Robertson, 59-60). She became, in her own words, the Mae West character, a parody of herself that she modelled on female impersonators and effectively embodied a ‘double mimesis’ (Robertson, 60 & 68). Here, as a female female impersonator, West’s vaudevillian work “flaunts and exagerates her femininity to reveal the performative activity of gender and sexual identities,” a deeply subversive act that, while rooted in fun and entertainment, was able to “deprive stereotypes of their currency” (62). In these respects, vaudeville’s devotion to the antithetical often relied heavily on gender play, subverting sexual and social norms, and conducting “highly elaborated satires of ‘straight society’” (Cooper, 515). To boot, West was a pioneer of camp in that she identified it by name as her preferred mode of comedy. 

While chosen families, witty quips, and gender play may make appearances in the modern sitcom, these stereotypically-queer gestures are not enough to explain how gay individuals indentify with sitcom characters. Of course, not all queer people are in search of chosen families, and not all queer people resonate with camp humour. In this final section, I will clarify the concept of the queer icon and give credence to the individual, ephemeral evidence that makes a sitcom character attain such a status. 

The queer icon is an inherently ephemeral fixture in whichever realm they assume. Accordingly, online definitions of the queer icon are incongruent. In an op-ed for GayStarNews, queer contributor James Besanvalle shares his own critera for what constitutes a gay icon: “They’re flamboyant, feminine and glamorous,” he says, “all qualities I suppressed growing up, but have since come to embrace.” Besanvalle—like most other queer commentators—notes that it is an inherently subjective concept, as “gay icons are a personal choice.” Nick Levine of i-D shares why, to him, Taylor Swift is not a gay icon: “there’s something about the personal narrative Swift portrays on social media and in her songs that doesn’t feel very queer” (my emphasis; Levine). I emphasise this affective criteria to preface my final discussion: the icon’s worth to the queer individual is never universal nor necessarily defineable. Like Muñoz, I maintain that the queer icon is, above all, a “possibility, a sense of self-knowing,” and a particular “mode of sociality and relationality” (Muñoz, 6). This factor must be considered when analysing how a queer icon has earned their space in an individual’s conscience.

Though the sitcom, as I have articulated, offers queer-coded humour and images of non-normative families and individuals, its potentiality for self-knowing is entirely dependent on the individual who is performing the self-knowing. Here, I turn to Savannah Sipple, who, in a commentary piece for Salon, lends ephemeral evidence of Golden Girls’ Rose Nylund’s (Betty White) iconic status. She recalls an episode from the show’s second season, which aired in 1986 at the height of the AIDS crisis; titled “Isn’t It Romantic”, the episode shows Rose accept, without a momentary tinge of disgust or anger, that their visiting houseguest, a lesbian, is attracted to her. Sipple recounts seeing this episode for the first time as a rerun and that she imagined, despite the moment’s brevity, how her queer elders watching its premier would be able to resonate with such a characterisation. She was awestruck at the prospect of a Reagan-era gay person getting to “see an older straight woman get it.” As these imagined young queer folks were undoubtedly tasked to navigate the homophobic social and political rhetoric of the era—an epidemic in itself—this context “mattered to [Sipple]” during her viewing experience, and it fashioned, in her mind, not only Rose but Betty White herself as the supportive mother-figure she never had. Her anecdotal account proves that self-identification is inherently ambivalent—she was able to make an icon for herself while drawing upon the experiences of others in her community. Making an icon out of a sitcom character is both ever-ephemeral and ever-collaborative. Most significantly, it is not up to the icon, but the iconographer.

Ultimately, the affective storylines, vaudevillian roots, and camp humour of the sitcom genre may broadly appeal to queer communities. However, to broadly define how a sitcom character—or any other figure, for that matter—becomes considered a tool for queer self-identification is next to impossible; we cannot identify the self-identified. References

Castiglia, Christopher, and Christopher Reed. “‘Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well’: Memory and Queer Culture in ‘Will and Grace.’” Cultural Critique, no. 56, 2004, pp. 158–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354720. Accessed 3 Jun. 2022.

Evan, Cooper. “Decoding Will and Grace: Mass Audience Reception of a Popular Network Situation Comedy.” Sociological Perspectives, vol. 46, no. 4, 2003, pp. 513–33. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/sop.2003.46.4.513. Accessed 3 Jun. 2022.

Levine, Nick. “How to Be a Queer Icon.” i-D, Vice, 11 July 2017, i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/59gg95/how-to-be-a-queer-icon. 

Miller, Quinlan. Camp Tv : Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History. Duke University Press, 2019.

Muraco, Anna. “Intentional Families: Fictive Kin Ties between Cross-Gender, Different Sexual Orientation Friends.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 68, no. 5, 2006, pp. 1313–1325.

Pugh, Tison. The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom. Rutgers University Press, 2018. 

Robertson, Pamela. “‘The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me’: Mae West’s Identification with the Feminist Camp.” Cinema Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, pp. 57–72. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1225605. Accessed 3 Jun. 2022.

Sipple, Savannah. “Betty White on ‘The Golden Girls’ Taught Me Queer Self-Acceptance.” Salon, 4 Jan. 2022, www.salon.com/2022/01/03/betty-golden-girls-lgbtq-rose/. 

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV : Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse : Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Duke University Press, 2001.

White, Betty, performer. “Isn’t It Romantic.” Golden Girls, season 2, episode 5, NBC, 1986.

[rubykarelia]

GUILTY PLEASURES: An Open Letter to the Reality Television Fan (blog post + interview, 2021)

CW: misogyny; domestic violence; sexual violence

Dear Reality Television Viewer,

Let me know if this has happened to you. You’re watching your program of choice—whether it be Little Women or Love Island—and someone peeks over your shoulder. They ask you, often with a brutal, albeit needless, sense of exasperation, “How can you watch this stuff?”

“I don’t really like it, it’s just a guilty pleasure,” you reply. Your cadence probably matches the redhanded insistence of someone just caught scrolling through an ex's Instagram or smoking a cigarette under the porch after their parents went to bed. You lied, too—you do really like it. Maybe you’ve scavenged through dozens of virus-ridden internet alcoves for the right episode, and you memorized the explosive fight between Luann and Bethenny from a few seasons back, and you recite it in the car as if it's one of your favourite songs.

Pretending that an activity I genuinely cherish is only a ‘guilty pleasure’ is something I often find myself doing in social spaces. It’s become an automatic response, a preemptive apology as if I’ve been caught in the act of something truly guilt-worthy. You may relate.

It’s a tragic reality, especially in the case of our mutual hobby: art forms geared towards women are disproportionately susceptible to social criticism. The New York Times’s Emily Nussbaum details this ‘guilty pleasure phenomenon’; genres that underscore women’s stories, such as the reality show or the soap opera, are frequently dismissed by both critics and casual viewers as mere fluff. This speaks to a cultural standard that greatly informs how we view art “that makes women’s lives look like fun.” Our television guides and streaming selections are overflowing with programs that do just the opposite; in fact, depictions of violence against women are only growing more plentiful onscreen. The Parents Television Council reports that scenes depicting violence against women on TV increased by 120% between 2004 and 2009. As Hollywood is dominated by male executives, these stories are being “written, directed and produced by men, for a male audience,” as Battered Women's Support Services' Jessica West argues. Reality television often subverts this practice; programs such as The Real Housewives franchise feature predominantly female casts, exploring the dynamics between women as they navigate friendships, careers, and social conflict. Medium contributor mad dyke asserts that such shows, “like most things that are for women by women,” are deemed “vapid, stupid, shallow, value-less, etc.” But how can they be all of these things at once, when so many fans, like us, regard consuming these shows as hobbies? Are we in the wrong for not seeking out the spectacle of something, well, less fun?

For some more insight, I spoke with podcaster Stephanie Lee, the host of Real Housewives of Neopia. On each episode, Stephanie breaks down an episode of reality television, dextrously dissecting its characters and storylines. We all have our own reasons as to why we’ve made reality TV a constant in our streaming routine, so I asked Stephanie to divulge her own. “I love how it holds up a mirror to human behaviour in every way,” she told me. The foundation of reality television is social tension, which makes it an apt genre for people-watching. Per mad dyke, “it’s about the minutiae of relationships,” the spotlight shed on ordinary conflicts with which many of us can resonate. Bethenny gets the same haircut as Luann. Stassi disinvites Jax from the Vegas trip. Miss Juicy tells Minnie to leave her party. We watch because we want to see how they will or won’t react, how characters evolve or dissolve on screen, how relationships form and quickly crumble. We watch to study the nuances of human relationships and social dynamics in a way completely unique to its genre. Unlike fictional shows, the characters extend beyond the onscreen diegesis—these are real people, real families, real stories. 

Real stories—well, sort of. It wouldn’t be a discussion about reality TV without regarding the elephant in the room: production interference. “You do know it’s all fake, right?” onlookers tell us as an ired Teresa Giudice flips a table. Naysayers love to recite this line with a saccharine condescension as if we’re not aware that all television is at least somewhat contrived. We know that the Real Housewives aren’t as real as their title attests. Yes, we know that producers whisper in the ears of cast members to incite drama. And, yes, we know that editors often manipulate conflicts or characters to fulfil a certain narrative trope.

Significantly, in brandishing this argument of inauthenticity, one may overlook the potential for a more complex viewing experience. Stephanie asserts that “even contrived and overly produced reality TV showcases something about human nature.” We, as fans, are aware that behind-the-scenes interference is inevitable, and watching with a knowing-eye can enable us to scrutinize how our culture defines entertainment, or what is worthy of being broadcast. Stephanie aptly says that production or network interferences “can be deeply revealing about the perceptions that shape their world and interactions within it.” 

Reality TV is more complex than people think. It’s not just manufactured drama; as Stephanie says, there is a “fully realized lore” to reality television despite its purported shallowness. “I love investigating and juxtaposing the behind-the-scenes stuff with the final project,” she says, emulating Jason Mittell’s understanding of the modern television viewer. Mittell’s work in Complex TV distinguishes how contemporary television demands a more complex viewing experience; now, viewers must practice more active engagement and outsource backstories to better their understanding of intricate onscreen narratives. Even lowbrow genres such as the sitcom have adopted entangled plotlines, literary motifs, and reflexive techniques as production standards. In fact, Stephanie compares her personal favourite reality show, Vanderpump Rules, to The Sopranos, a program that serves as an exemplar of prestige television in Complex TV. “It has all the expertly executed twists of prestige television like The Sopranos. […] Many of the characters present as morally bankrupt beyond reasonable understanding. With both, the characters and the wicked webs they weave are so mesmerizing.” 

So, do we need to feel guilty for consuming reality television? “I feel no guilt as long as I’m consuming responsibly,” Stephanie thinks. To view responsibly, we must harness a critical eye. “Reality TV often showcases exploitation, reduces marginalized participants into negative tropes, and can platform unsavoury ideals.” There are, indeed, patterns of mistreatment, social contention, and unfair typecasting among participants that must be acknowledged and denounced. By “actively questioning and criticizing all those factors,” we can still enjoy reality television, just as we engage with other media with similar production pitfalls. “I’m confident in my interests and feel reality TV can serve a more intellectual purpose if the viewer wants,” Stephanie concludes. 

The generic standards of reality television are a symptom of patriarchal custom that depreciates women’s enjoyment as shallow and vapid. But we can watch Bravo with the same interpretive approach that many bring to HBO. We can study the social dynamics of reality TV in active, intellectual ways. Or, we can simply watch what makes us happy. I’m making an effort to disassociate the word ‘guilty’ from my pleasures, and I hope you do, too. The truth is, my pleasure shouldn’t be on trial, and neither should yours.

(Thank you to Stephanie from Real Housewives of Neopia! Check her podcast out here!)

[rubykarelia]

ALGORITHMIC CONTAGION: Pro-ED Satellites and Self-Tracking Online (media analysis, 2022)

TW: eating disorders; self-harm

Somewhere in the world, a TikTok user uploads an open invitation—first, however, they proffer foreign eyes with a precursory eating disorder (ED) trigger warning. @reicalls is searching for like-minded individuals to engage in a collaborative mission of sorts to ring in 2022: “does someone wanna be weight loss buddies?” they ask (@reicalls). As a team, these e-quaintances would “update each other [sic], fast together, make goals together ect.” With the sentiment overlaid atop a K-pop dance video, this poster’s identity is carefully cloistered. In the comments section, @reicalls laments that the group is now full; fortunately, to a disappointed @Noname662919, there are countless other users seeking to construct yet another online ED satellite.

This essay will mediate an intricate analysis of ED content on TikTok as a distinctive media practice. After delineating the general nature of the pro-ED community, I will consider how disordered individuals use media accounting and self-tracking to negotiate both a quantified and qualified self. Next, I examine the social implications of the pro-ED TikTok subculture with a focus on its position within the larger online infrastructure. Intentionally sequestered to a self-aware satellite public, I will also explore how pro-ED hashtags and coded verbiage function in TikTok’s updated moderation system. In doing so, we will see not only how the pro-ED satellite supervenes online spaces, but that social media—namely, TikTok—has transformed disordered ideology into a somewhat contagious affliction. 

The following sections will intricately examine the pro-ED TikTok community and hypothesise its attraction to afflicted individuals. In consideration of the quantified self, we will consider how self-tracking is a cornerstone of disordered behaviour; as well, I assert that the social aspect of TikTok has transformed the eating disorder into the pursuit of a qualified self. 

Most pro-ED TikTok users dedicate their accounts to conducting weight check-ins, circulating thinspo—that is, images of thin bodies for inspiration—updating food logs, and engaging in intensive diet challenges with other members. Primarily, pro-ED users inhabit their profiles as claustral spaces for self-monitoring. For example, in a precursory post, one 16-year-old claims that “this account is to inspire me to restrict but u can use it too if u need it [sic]” (@anaricecake). Though the nature of the TikTok interface is dynamic and interactive, pro-ED profiles are quite often anonymous or private as they approach the community with an ascetic mindset, posting daily weigh-ins as a form of self-discipline (Osler & Krueger). For instance, the disclosing of stats is common across such accounts—in these posts, members reflect upon their starting weight and current weight.

These monastic routines mirror traditional self-tracking practices and align with the pursuit of a datified, quantified self. Here, consistently keeping a record of one's eating habits or workout routines “[turns] bodies, experiences, or behaviors into data” (Humphreys, 22). Akin to disordered behaviour, wearable fitness tracking devices—like the Fitbit—claim to “bestow self-knowledge” in their ability to quantify body processes and keep an aggregatable record of data (Crawford, Lingel, & Karppi, 480). Chronicling their statistics grants disordered individuals a retrospective pragmatism—by keeping a record, “[one] can remember, relive, recount, reconcile, and reckon at future points” (Humphreys, 13). One may thus experience “agency through mediated self-knowledge” (Crawford, Lingel, & Karppi, 494); notably, in the context of these disorders, attaining a sense of authority over one’s body metrics is a key motivation to further restrict. In uploading this information online, the pursuit of a quantified self becomes a multiplex quest for control. 

Disordered individuals use TikTok to equalise the two-fold power dynamic between the quantified self and her data. The data retrieved by wearable tracking devices is “aggregated, interpreted, and potentially onsold in a range of contexts well beyond the control of the user” (Crawford, Lingel, & Karppi, 490). Conversely, on TikTok, one user pins a video reading “unpinning at 40kg,” meaning she will update the data at the top of her page when her goal is attained (@haseullbs). Unlike a Fitbit wearer, this user has chosen where her data will go, and such digital upkeep is a way of exerting agency within the confines of a paralysing mental ailment. A major catalyst for disordered eating is the heightened “value of exercising control,” and, accordingly, pro-ED members may seek to control the fate of their self-knowledge by compiling it on an online profile (Osler & Krueger). The pursuit of the quantified self may extrapolate why dysmorphic teens flock to these communities; it is worth reiterating, however, that while @haseullbs may feel a sense of control over her quantified self, it is a tragic reality that any power located in disordered eating is merely illusory.

It is through the social undertow of TikTok that the pro-ED community has birthed a distinct brand of the online qualified self. The pro-ED poster is inherently aware of their surroundings—for instance, we see trigger warnings and efforts in anonymity to construct (or obstruct) one’s online identity in consideration of others. Humphreys labels this effort as the pursuit of a qualified self; that is, users are “defined by the qualities and attributes…as evidenced in their media accounting” (Humphreys, 18). In this way, online pro-ED members consciously form a qualified disordered self; that is, self-knowledge relating to one’s body dominates their profiles and is situated “within a relational context” (24). In these communities, body data is not merely analysed individually but mediated by other members; suddenly, the disorder is a process of self-discipline reenacted in a social setting.

Constructing a qualified disordered self entails posting media traces that align with the common interests of ED sufferers: fervent willpower, an affinity for all things dainty, and, namely, a low body weight. Here, the quantified self in pro-ED circles is very much conflated with one’s qualified self—the user is, indeed, “self-focused” on logging her body weight, but turning it into content “reveals the ways that others feature prominently in our representations of ourselves” (Humphreys, 23-24). ED survivor and social worker Lauren Gunebaum asserts that “individuals with eating disorders are often perfectionists,” and, in many cases, this results in the desire “to be the best at starving” (emphasis added, Grunebaum). Further, sufferers often have to “prove authenticity” in social settings, resulting in pro-ED internet slang such as “wannarexics”, denoting undisciplined or presumably inauthentic members of the community (Osler & Krueger). Much like other social media users, this means that the qualified self of an afflicted individual is similarly modified and selective (Humphreys, 19). Hence, most pro-ED TikTok accounts curate a qualified disordered self: a true victim of the disease and, most importantly, a physical embodiment of its effects.

Accordingly, What I Eat In A Day (WIEIAD) videos are commonplace on pro-ED TikTok, especially those which exhibit a concerted effort in restricting—many such instances do not surpass 800 calories per day, and, in dire cases, a member may eulogise a day’s worth of fasting. For example, one member celebrates a troubling prospect: “this is the happiest day of my life,” she writes in a cutesy font atop a baby-pink filter, “my mom is allowing me to fast for 7 days” (@boneyzombi). In doing so, she is effectively advertising an achievement to her followers, albeit through a distorted lens—in the comments, she is congratulated by another user. In these ways, the qualified self—that which she shows to others—of the pro-ED poster is, above all, disordered; she employs her quantified self—that which she ate, lost, or exercised—as proof of this fact.

The most compelling facet of the qualified disordered self is its very existence in both a subculture and social media at large. Osler and Krueger explain how solely pro-ED forums are epistemic echo chambers that “generate certainty about [pro-ED] beliefs and commitments, while simultaneously excluding and discrediting voices outside the community” (emphases added, Osler and Krueger). However, by moving pro-ED discourse to TikTok, a “less hierarchical, more visual, and publicly accessible” stage, members must now choose to exclude themselves. This final section will examine how, on social media, the pro-ED echo chamber is effectively deconstructed and has become, rather, a satellite public within a larger conglomerate. Faulty moderation techniques and lasting beauty standards precipitate the normalisation of disordered content on such platforms.

The pro-ED community, as a satellite public, seeks more exclusive, focused content and sociality that is cloistered from the mainstream. This term, borrowed from Catherine R. Squires, denotes “those that desire to be separate from other publics” as they “do not desire regular discourse” (463). Integrated into the larger TikTok landscape, the pro-ED satellite public still engages with other publics intermittently but remains intentionally sequestered as its interests are displaced (463-64). As stated, pro-ED TikTok is aware that its sentiment is unorthodox to the mainstream—an obsession with skinniness is antithetical to the contemporary body positivity movement, and rapid weight loss is considered by many to be a form of self-harm. 

TikTok’s algorithm and moderation practices have been known to turn the inside out, however. In February of 2022, following the remediation of its algorithm, TikTok made an additional attempt to remedy the insidious nature of its pro-ED content. Though they “already remove content that promotes eating disorders,” they vowed to train their moderation teams “to remain alert to a broader scope of content” that indirectly promotes such behaviours, such as overexercising and fasting (Keenan). In consultation with experts, moderators are now tasked to manually remove content that encourages disordered eating habits or make such content “ineligible for recommendation.” It is questionable that, as of April, the aforementioned videos and countless iterations remain available to the TikTok public.

Unbeknownst to many—and overlooked by moderators—pro-ED content is still thriving in internet alcoves across the vast spectrum of social media under coded hashtags and verbiage. While most satellite publics “do not feel compelled to hide or change cultural particularities,” pro-ED content survives by tactical means to avoid being taken down (Squires, 464). Since 2021, pro-ED members have implemented minor changes to both hashtags and captions to skirt the platform’s most effective automatic detection tool: word filters (Gillespie, 98). For example, this could look like #disorder becoming #d1s0rder (Hobbes, Barry, & Koh). In a WIEIAD video, a user logs that she “pvrged” rather than purged to remain undetected (@cupidiet). Coded hashtags are now necessary for such content to be categorised by users, and gibberish tags may seemingly isolate harmful content from the public eye. However, even from an enclosed satellite chamber, it seems that disordered rhetoric is a powerful contagion that cannot be antidoted by mere moderation.

Despite TikTok’s steps to ban pro-ED content, it continues to reach new eyes. According to Gillespie, the prohibition of disordered eating content online “may be the hardest to justify” (Gillespie, 61). Many contend that penalising pro-ED subcultures is too contentious as it “risks pushing them farther underground and misses an opportunity to intervene more productively” (68). I argue, however, that moderating is most difficult due to the insidious nature of body dysmorphia, a mainstay in the public beyond the pro-ED satellite. All genders experience the pressure to conform to a certain type of body; specifically, the glorification of the thin body is a “strongly entrenched Western cultural requirement” (Venus Jin, 158-163). Philosopher Susan Bordo concurs that, for women, in particular, the “preoccupation with slenderness…has become normative” such that eating disorders are commonplace afflictions that do not necessarily need diagnostic labels (ctd in Day & Keys, 82-83). Popular culture, medical discrimination, and gender constructs are indirect champions of the pro-ED tenet: objective beauty trumps physical discomfort. 

Across social media, many non-afflicted individuals promote weight loss through low-cal recipes and circulate thinspo as an aspirational aesthetic. In doing so, “these images no longer appear so niche or disturbing but share instantly recognisable qualities with both mainstream fashion and art photography and Internet meme culture” (Ging & Garvey, 13). Moderators are now enlisted to decipher the difference between pro-ED content and content that indirectly assumes a disordered ideology, a task that is almost always up to human judgment (Gillespie, 102). The very nature of our highly-saturated, dynamic, and increasingly visual social media landscape—a prosthesis of offscreen norms of representation—presents a major qualm for moderators: when does an image of a skinny person become thinspiration?

Pro-ED TikTok is a satellite public among the platform’s countless other communities. In terms of media accounting and self-tracking, the pro-ED user offers a nuanced example of appropriating social media posting in the pursuit of power. On a larger scale, the presence of the pro-ED satellite on TikTok vexes the platform’s current moderation techniques and, in turn, conveys the insidious nature of dysmorphic rhetoric. An otherwise non-contagious illness, eating disorders have grown digitally transmissible.

References @anaricecake. “#rexi #thinpo hope this reaches the right ppl, plz no pro recovery comments my cw is literally in the obese range.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@anaricecake/video/7051115477073956102?is_copy_url= 1&is_from_webapp=v1.

@boneyzombi. “| I'm so happy and proud of myself ! ! <3 feel free to ask me any questions ! #fyp #momo #foryou #foru #fasting #weightloss #fancam #for #you.” TikTok, 2021, https://www.tiktok.com/@boneyzombi/video/7005124893171928326?is_copy_url=1 &is_from_webapp=v1.

Crawford, Kate, et al. “Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 4–5, Aug. 2015, pp. 479–496, doi:10.1177/1367549415584857.

@cupidiet. “my layout looks messy laugh out loud #cupidiet #weightloss #kcaltok #fyp #skinny #xyzbca #bodygoals #ed #wieiad.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/foryou?feed_mode=v1&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v 1&item_id=7086099956540509446#/@cupidiet/video/7086099956540509446

Day, Katy, and Tammy Keys. “Starving in Cyberspace: The Construction of Identity on ‘Pro-eating-disorder’ Websites.” Critical Bodies. Jan. 2008, pp 81-100, DOI:10.1057/9780230591141_5.

Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet : Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press, 2018. PDF.

Ging, Debbie, and Sarah Garvey. “‘Written in These Scars Are the Stories I Can’t Explain’: A Content Analysis of pro-Ana and Thinspiration Image Sharing on Instagram.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 3, Mar. 2018, pp. 1181–1200,

doi:10.1177/1461444816687288.

@haseullbs. “<3.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@haseullbs/video/7081701737542 798597?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1

Hobbs, Tawnell D., Rob Barry and Yoree Koh. "'the Corpse Bride Diet': How TikTok Inundates Teens with Eating-Disorder Videos; the App's Algorithm can Send Users Down Rabbit Holes of Narrow Interest, Resulting in Potentially Dangerous Content such as Emaciated Images, Purging Techniques, Hazardous Diets and Body Shaming." Wall Street Journal (Online), Dec 17 2021, ProQuest. Web. 14 Apr. 2022 .

Humphreys, Lee. "Introduction." The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life., The MIT Press, 19. MIT Press Scholarship Online. Date Accessed 14 Apr. 2022 https://mitpress-universitypressscholarship-com.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/ view/10.7551/mitpress/9780262037853.001.0001/upso-9780262037853-chapter-001.

Jin, Seunga Venus. “Interactive Effects of Instagram Foodies' Hashtagged #Foodporn and Peer Users' Eating Disorder on Eating Intention, Envy, Parasocial Interaction, and Online Friendship.” Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking vol. 21, 3, 2018, pp. 157-167. doi:10.1089/cyber.2017.0476 Keenan, Cormac. “Strengthening Our Policies to Promote Safety, Security, and Well-Being on Tiktok.” TikTok Newsroom, TikTok, 8 Feb. 2022, newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/ strengthening-our-policies-to-promote-safety-security-and-wellbeing-on-tiktok. 

Osler, Lucy, and Joel Krueger. “Proana Worlds: Affectivity and Echo Chambers Online.” Topoi, (20211212), 2021, doi:10.1007/s11245-021-09785-8. Paul, Kari. “'It Spreads like a Disease': How pro-Eating-Disorder Videos Reach Teens on Tiktok.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16 Oct. 2021, www.theguardian. com/technology/2021/oct/16/tiktok-eating-disorder-thinspo-teens. 

@reicalls. “Tht would be chill. #foryou #fyp #weightloss #ive #gaeul #kpop #body #diet #workout #fancam.” TikTok, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@reicalls/video/7058 580538759597318?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1.

Squires, Catherine R. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory, vol. 12, no. 4, 2002, pp. 446–468., doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x.

[rubykarelia]

WHO SAID THAT? Steps to Decolonise and Demystify AI Literature in Canadian Legislation and Culture (white paper, 2022)

1. Who Owns AI-Generated Text?

It is now commonplace for online users to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that expedite the writing process. In fact, AI is integrated into most online writing programs inconspicuously—for instance, auto-correct has become a digital guardian angel for haphazard typers. Automated software like OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), however, is capable of producing entire original works from a range of genres, including poetry, short stories, and screenplays. Many creative writers, then, employ GPT-3 to produce so-called “astoundingly human-like” original text that can be later published (Starnino, 2022, para.5). Consider Aum Golly, a book of poems that writer Jukka Aalho ‘co-wrote’ with GPT-3, or Allado-McDowell’s novel, Amor Cringe, in which the author incorporated GPT-3’s output. 

Aalho and Allado-McDowell explicitly stated that their respective works were collaborations with GPT-3. However, who can be credited for AI-produced literature that is not disclosed as such or is otherwise untethered to a human actor? As AI is considered nonhuman in the Canadian Copyright Act, ownership over AI-produced texts is nebulous (Plaitas, 2018, p.7). This phenomenon invokes a manifold of both legal and ethical quandaries. Who owns the words, and who is responsible for their repercussions? This paper advocates an anthropocentric perspective as we move forth with developing coherent AI-related policy, education, and cultural discourse in Canada. I argue that the lack of coherent copyright laws over AI-generated text fails to hold accountable the human actors fundamental to the design, development, and maintenance of such systems. As a result, users are ill-equipped to recognise and challenge the colonial logics embedded in AI writing technologies. As well, this oversight poses the cultural risk of mystifying AI, which in turn depreciates the ontological value of human-generated stories and inhibits Canadians from confronting our country’s hegemonic structures. Words matter, and in the pursuit to dismantle colonial logics, to whom words belong matters, if not more. 

2. GPT-3, Copyright, and the Repercussions of Colonial Logics in ‘Authorless’ AI Literature

To contextualise the phenomenon of modern AI writing software, we can refer to the design and practical use of GPT-3. OpenAI engineers developed GPT-3 as a deep learning language model with 175 billion parameters, meaning it has an unprecedented amount of “value that [its] neural network tries to optimize during training” (Heaven, 2022, para.3). Users first input a prompt to establish a distinct style or tone; the software then identifies and processes the passage’s context before generating complete bodies of text according to the user’s desired length or format (Cojocaru, 2021, para.1). Users often publish AI literature—that is, the completed works generated by an AI—in casual discursive spaces such as online forums or as op-eds. For example, when posts from college student Liam Porr’s blog went viral on Hacker News in 2020, the text went undetected by most readers as being written entirely by GPT-3 (Hao, 2020, para.1-3). 

Evidently, from the technology’s development to practical use beyond, humans are inextricably enmeshed with GPT-3’s literary output. Despite this, AI literature is regarded by policy and in cultural discourse as the product of a non-human entity. As it stands, Canadian intellectual property law and government policies remain unclear as to whether these texts are eligible for copyright, as such regulations only “protect works that are the product of an author’s skill and judgement”—here, jurisprudence implies that an ‘author’ must be a natural human (Olijnyk, 2022, para.16). AI systems, from development to deployment, cannot operate without human actors, however, and this lack of policy “frees us from responsibility” and gives disproportionate power to the systems alone (Mhlambi, qtd. in Miller, 2022, para. 13). 

Our current policy—or lack thereof—does not comprehensively acknowledge the human developers or the users responsible for proliferating colonial logics. Like other language models (LM), GPT-3 is trained on public data and with “little considerations of the biases that may be present in the data” (Abid, et. al, 2021, p.299). In a study on anti-Islamic rhetoric in AI software, Abid, Farooqi, et. al observe that “when the word ‘Muslim’ is included in the prompt, it is difficult to generate GPT-3 completions that do not contain violent language” (Abid, et. al, 2021, p.304). As AI companies are currently operated by those with inherent biases—namely, white men—it is a challenging, or an even unwelcome, task “to define what factors amount to impermissible bias and how to test for them” (Chesterman, 2021, p.156). Tech pundits have praised the unprecedented scope of the GPT-3’s training set, though this may exacerbate the issues. A report by Bender et. al asserts that such a vast, unfiltered database “leads to risks of real-world harm, should LM-generated text be disseminated” as “synthetic text can enter into conversations without any person or entity being accountable for it” (Bender et. al, 2021, p.618). That is, hateful rhetoric generated by AI literature infiltrates discursive spaces, and the same groups subject to the “systematic mistreatment and inadequate legal and economic protections rooted in the colonial project” are, once again, left unprotected (Mohamed et. al, 2021, p.2). If, according to policy, AI writing technologies produce literature “without an iota of human comprehension”, any colonial rhetoric that AI echoes may be problematically regarded as objective truth (Tianhui, 2020, para.5). 

The lack of policy on AI places undue trust in digitally-reproduced colonial logics; in tandem with the mystification of AI literature, we are actively diluting the ontological value of suppressed words and stories. On popular media forums, headlines boast terms like “cutting-edge” or “superhuman speed” when reporting on AI writing technologies (Vincent, 2019; Mann, 2020). When we mystify AI capabilities in this way, we frame such systems as not only outside of the law but outside of humanity. Per Mhlambi, regarding AI as an ‘oracle’ of truth emulates the Christian orientation of colonial history in which God was used to justify violence, assimilation, and resource exploitation (Mhlambi, qtd. in Miller, 2022, para.12). This divine-like upperhand has ontological repercussions. We cannot afford to further mystify discourse that “derides writing as valueless”, as this is especially harmful to those already subject to discursive suppression (Chokshi). Writers of colour—especially people who identify as Indigenous or Black—are disproportionately overlooked by Canadian agencies, editors, and publishers; in fact, at a 2020 Writers’ Union discussion on anti-Black racism in Canada, one attendee shared that their literary style was “written off [by editors] as grammatical errors or language that [needs] to be corrected” (Kirk, 2020, Editors section, p.1). The deification of colonial AI logics coexists with the systemic racism in Canada; if we do not act, racialised voices will be dispossessed, twofold. 

3. Remedying the Lack of Accountability with an Anthropocentric Approach

i) Changes to Canadian Copyright Law

First, I will advise the Canadian government to clearly delineate that humans inherently ‘own’ and ‘author’ AI-produced text. Specifically, I argue that we must adopt an anthropocentric perspective to establish coherent, ethical laws that place real humans accountable for the development and practical use of AI writing technologies. 

I agree with the Canadian Bar Association’s assertion that “we must examine the possibility of recognizing a human author behind the AI’s process” (my emphasis; Plaitas, 2018, p.8). While AI writing systems “lack legal personality and cannot have rights,” they are invariably designed by various human stakeholders that should be considered responsible for the plain text these systems generate (Bender, Gebru et. al, 2021, p.619). Accordingly, we must adapt copyright laws similar to those enacted in the United Kindom and New Zealand that “attribute authorship to the human or humans who arranged for the creation of the work” using an AI system (Lipkus et. al, 2021, para.13). Essentially, human-like writing needs human-like governance. 

We may also expand the scope of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) to enforce legal responsibilities upon designers during the early stages of developing these technologies. Here, AIDA would stipulate that the creators, controllers, and owners of the AI software are, under law, responsible for the design and outputs of these systems (Hayes, 2022d, slide 20). 

As it stands, it is both semantically and legally dubious to claim that a user ‘authored’ a text by simply activating an AI text generator. To ensure coherency at the level of practice use, we should thus employ a ‘maker’ approach to AI copyright law, which would clarify “‘the person by whom the arrangements necessary for making of the work’” (Plaitas, 2017, p.14-15). This way, the human user of an AI technology is identifiable as a quasi-authorial entity over the generated text.

ii) Increased Corporate Responsibility and Collaboration in Design 

I also call upon major developers to remediate the training process to ensure that text-generating software no longer reproduce colonial logics in the form of negative stereotypes, biases, and hate speech. OpenAI researchers attempted to mitigate this issue in 2021 by “feeding [GPT-3] roughly 100 encyclopedia like samples…on topics like…abuse, violence, and injustice” (Johnson, 2021, para.3). This information, I argue, should already exist within the 175 billion parameters of GPT-3’s neural network, manifold. Evidently, further action is necessary.

Decolonial audits, then, must be executed by AI developers—they are, afterall, “building a relationship to which they should attend” (Hayes, 2022c, slide 12). In tandem with regular and thorough audits, tech companies must implement institutions that would concurrently “investigate complaints that do not easily get within existing causes of action and to represent the public interest with respect to systemic issues” (Chesterman, 2021, p.158). Additionally, we need to reconcile that the hegemonic biases reproduced through AI are symptomatic of a lack of representation in the technology companies that design them.

As major tech companies foreground a white male perspective, going forward, our focus should be on “decentering the West as the voice of reason” such that AI systems do not “reinforce the same biases that are already present in society” (Mhlambi, qtd. in Miller, 2022, para.18). I agree with Bender et. al that because AI writing technologies interact with humans “in immediate and vivid ways,” they should be designed with “forethought and care” (Bender et. al, 2021, p.619). I echo Mhlambi’s recommendation that AI companies offer fellowships and work alongside groups like Tierra Común, a collective of Latin American scholars and researchers “gathering resources and promoting activists and thinkers” to reject data colonialism and better represent the voices of the Global South (Mhlambi, qtd. in Miller, 2022, para.16). 

iii) Cultural Overhaul Against AI Mystification

Finally, I recommend that a cultural shift is necessary to address the issue of AI mystification. A cursory online search suggests that text generators like GPT-3 are superhuman, capable of semi-supernatural literary powers. Consequent to the lasting trend of mystification among discourse, we are perpetuating the myth that AI-produced literature is not only objective—“a simple mirror of the collective”—but also outside of our realm of human capability and intellect (Noble, 2018, p.36). However, by adopting an anthropocentric approach—in tandem with an historical orientation, per Helen Hayes—we can “construct a new genealogy of contemporary technological culture that centers bodily subjects” (Hayes, 2022a, p.48-49). Community leaders and media scholars must commit to reorienting AI discourse away from the fantastical and towards the “social, political, environmental, and cultural systems from which [automated systems] arose” (Hayes, 2022e slide 4). As such, users will be more empowered to challenge AI’s “illusion of unmediated action” and its enmeshment with colonial logics (Hayes, 2022b, slide 8). I believe this is an especially dire perspective to spread among our increasingly-digitised youth population: AI is, simply put, not untouchable. In fact, it is touched by many, and it touches many, too. 

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was not to wholly dismiss AI writing tools, nor to discredit writers such as Aalho and Allado-McDowell, whose collaborations with GPT-3 exemplify how AI technologies might enhance literary practices. Rather, I implore policymakers and cultural actors alike to adopt an anthropocentric approach to AI literature moving forward. Without explicit policy related to AI ownership, we fail to discern the presence of humans necessary to the design and the practical use of text generators. As a result, it is difficult to challenge the colonial logics reproduced through AI, as the machine alone cannot be held accountable. Consequently, cultural discourse continues to mystify AI text software as it emulates human intellect while existing outside of the law, just out of physical touch. However, automated systems and AI-generated text do not exist in a vacuum, and it is crucial that both cultural discussions and Canadian legislation recognise how these systems are inherently indebted to the rationale, intellect, and ugliness of humankind. Look closer, and on every level, there are fingerprints.

References

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