3. The Voice Box

Some Disassembly Required

Fran Blanche is an electrical engineer and respected manufacturer of boutique guitar effects pedals who runs a popular YouTube channel called FranLab. Most of Blanche’s content is about science and technology, taking a gee-whiz, DIY approach to learning with her viewers by tinkering with broken and mysterious vintage electronics at a cluttered but meticulously organized workbench. Some of her videos are about what it’s like being a trans woman who has lived a very public life on YouTube for more than a decade, balancing transphobic harassment with the adulation of 284,000 followers, some of whom are trans folks looking for role models in music and STEM. In an interview with She Shreds Media, Blanche is photographed from behind, standing in front of her massive record collection, wearing a T-shirt with the title of the 1990 Cramps’ album “STAY SICK!” across the back.1 Her Pee-wee dolls sits on a high shelf, legs dangling over the edge, looking on toward the camera.

In a two-part video released in early 2023, Blanche tackles the broken, fast-talking Pee-wee doll, taking her own thirty-year-old doll apart to learn how it works, so she can diagnose and repair its broken speech.2 Blanche’s videos are technically well executed: the Pee-wee repair video features well framed, close-up, high-resolution footage of the doll and its excavated voice box. She begins with introductions and a little history: “This is my Pee-wee Herman Talking Doll. I’ve had him for a long, long time. You may have had one yourself back in the day.” Blanche says she got her doll in 1991 or 1992, after “warehouses full of Pee-wee merchandise just started hitting the market after being pulled off the shelves in the summer of 1991.” This warehousing rumor about the toy industry’s response to Reubens’s arrest is partially true (more on that later). Blanche pulls her broken doll’s string so the viewer can hear the sped-up screech of its broken voice, then explains how talking dolls work.

The doll’s torso conceals a tiny phonograph or record player, miniaturized to the size of a deck of cards and made entirely of plastic, with some metal parts. The string that peaks out of the doll’s back has a plastic ring on the end, large enough to grasp with fingertips. To make the doll talk, the string is pulled out from its back, against a tensioning spring that can be felt but not seen. As the string retracts back into the doll, this force is converted into rotation. The disc, or “record,” rotates against the tiny phonograph player’s stylus, or “needle,” and the sound encoded into the disc plays through a miniature, built-in speaker. A governor keeps the disc’s rotation speed consistent. The governor in Blanche’s doll hasn’t worked properly since it was almost new, causing the disc to spin too fast, which increases the speed and raises the pitch of Pee-wee’s voice into a screech. All this plastic and metal technology is sewn inside plush and fabric, concealed from view. Blanche says, “I want to do surgery on Pee-wee and get the device out and see if I can’t fix it, to make the Pee-wee Herman Talking Doll talk like Pee-wee again.”

The Pee-wee doll is hard to disassemble. His clothes have been whip-stitched in place and must be carefully removed. While undressing the doll, Blanche makes a couple of jokes about this now “indecent” video getting caught in YouTube’s content moderation dragnet. As she pulls down the doll’s pants to access more of the voice box inside the torso, Blanche says, “we’re getting pornographic here; the algorithm’s going to have a field day with this.” The voice box is molded from the same peach-colored plastic as Pee-wee’s face and extremities. Blanche learns that the whole doll is built around the voice box, which must be carefully but forcefully exhumed. When Blanche finally frees the voice box from the doll, one of the first details visible to the camera is a U.S. Patent number: 4004815A. I jot it down on a pad of paper that sits on my desk. Blanche spends the rest of the video taking the voice box apart, finding the governor, and troubleshooting why it no longer governs. She ends this video, part 1 of 2, convinced that the culprit is a stretched-out rubber O-ring that needs to be replaced. Blanche will order the part, then make a follow-up video once it arrives.

In U.S. Patent no. 4004815A, the inventor proposes a “Miniature toy sound-reproducing device” (1977) that offered more simplicity and durability in voice-box mechanisms for dolls and other toys. This device’s speed of rotation is manually adjustable using a levered speed regulator that interacts with the governor. I learn from reading the patent that this speed-regulating lever is likely not tensioned enough in the broken Pee-wee dolls. I return for Blanche’s second video armed with the formal knowledge of a smarmy media historian. Slowly, Blanche pokes and prods at the components inside the voice box, trying different adjustments and pulling the string, until she finds the speed regulating lever and tightens up the spring mechanism, giving it just the right amount of tension. She pulls the string and Pee-wee’s voice resonates at nearly the right speed, a bit on the slow slide but close enough.

Blanche could have looked up the patent herself, but that is precisely not the point of her work. Her knowledge of Pee-wee dolls, and many of the technologies she takes apart for fans, comes from somewhere else: buying one at a secondhand store in the early 1990s in the aftermath of Ruebens’s public shaming, keeping the doll for decades, carefully taking off the doll’s clothes and exhuming the broken box, then tinkering alongside her viewers. Though Blanche is not personally invested in this object with a history, her work to carefully give it (back) a voice resonates with meaning for collectors and fans. The gentle, meticulous attention and slow pace of troubleshooting Pee-wee’s broken voice box feels like tenderness toward this object, and the character and actor it represents. The repaired voice box is better than before, but not good as new, still speaking through its years spent broken and waiting. Even fixed, Pee-wee dolls sound out the ambivalence we ought to have about the promises of repair.

A Million Broken Governors

A governor is a mechanical device that maintains a consistent speed of rotation in a machine powered by a motor. Governors are regulating instruments that take something unruly, like electric current or human kinetics, and meter it out to produce a tame, harmonious effect that sounds true to life. They are tensioned by springs that slowly uncoil with use and age. A governor with a worn-out spring cannot govern. Replacement parts for old machines are hard to come by, and there is a whole world of hobbyists who repair old gramophones and phonographs by creating their own replacement springs, calibrated to exactly the right tension to produce the correct number of rotations per minute to play a record smoothly.

In the early twentieth century, governors replaced the need for human operators of phonographs to hand crank or foot peddle a machine at an even tempo. Before phonographs had governors, operators followed instruction manuals to practice cranking the machine at a consistent rate to produce the proper pitch in playback. These instructions in comportment included how to position one’s body and hold one’s wrist, but ultimately users had to guess at the proper pitch of instrument or voice and adjust their cranking accordingly.3 These guesses were normative and gendered, relying on taste and assumptions about what a performer’s voice ought to sound like. For talking dolls, governors ensure a voice that plays at the expected pace and sounds “right” because an even, standard rotation speed makes the pitch of a recorded voice sound true to life.

In the nineteenth century, the name “governor” applied the social context of the British Industrial revolution to a new category of technical device introduced to sewing machines in textile factories, steam engines, and other mechanical contexts where an even speed of rotation needed to be maintained. As key technologies of industrialization, governors were bound up with an emerging society of control, where technical instruments regulated the standard speeds of machines, factory floors, and a growing working class whose everyday rhythms matched the pace of capitalism. In other words, governors are technologies that relate to the social experience of being governed.

When I travel to visit my parents and we are getting ready to order food at a restaurant for lunch, my mom will often warn, “we’re having [lasagna, burgers, whatever] for dinner; govern yourselves accordingly.” She is British and joking but referencing something more serious: to be governed is to live under the regime of a sovereign, whether that be God, the law, a state, carceral logics, colonial power, or restricted appetites. The term ungovernable is tied up with racial capitalism and gender: over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “ungovernable” was used to describe disobedient children, enslaved Black people (especially women), soon-to-be-former colonies in rebellion, states in crisis, and revolutionary social movements.

More recently, ungovernability has become a rallying cry for progressive movements responding to the normalization of fascism in the twenty-first century. #becomeungovernable started as a hashtag used to describe anti-Trump protests but, by 2020, became a meme used to mark up images of pets and wild animals behaving badly, playfully exerting a little bit of wildness in the face of enclosure. A penguin on an iceberg holding a machete or a Labrador retriever, leash in mouth, walking itself across the street.

There is a certain amount of joy for me in ungovernability, particularly in the ways this concept has been taken up in Black, queer, and trans studies. In these fields, to become ungovernable is to resist surveillance or refuse the terms of enclosure through one’s whims, unruly affects, or appetites. Ungovernability marks how minoritized people carve out autonomous spaces for low-key expressions of resistant joy in spite of racial capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy: I’m thinking here of José Esteban Muñoz’s late work on the wild and aleatory potential of punk aesthetics in the face of Reaganism, or Saidiya Hartman’s attention to the erotic lives and desires of Black girls and women beyond the archive.4 In these instances, ungovernability is not merely cultural but rather a way of using one’s breathing, desiring body and countenance within the commons toward ways of living-on that refuse the terms of capture.

To be ungovernable is also often a refusal to capitulate to the terms of adulthood. This is because of the concept’s origins in Victorian descriptions of unruly, working-class children, and also because the family and school are often the first, primal experiences children have of governmentality and the rhythms of affective management: time to play, time to rest, time to eat, time to be taught. As an offbeat, childlike adult who owns his own house dedicated to unruly play, Pee-wee Herman is the epitome of a child who failed spectacularly at being governed and suffered no consequences for it. This is a television fantasy of growing up weird and sideways without experiencing any cruelty, violence, familial rejection, or incarceration in response. Pee-wee dolls are toys children were encouraged to play wildly with, stirring up trouble in collaboration with the doll and his pull string.

The television commercial that promoted Talking Pee-wee dolls portrays Pee-wee’s addition to the home as a fun interruption of household routines and aesthetics, and an extension of the show’s energy beyond the screen. The commercial takes place in the middle-class home of three chimpanzees dressed up like humans. Dad chimpanzee is grumpy and tells the child chimpanzees “No TV.” To rescue the child chimps from their ensuing boredom, a human dad and son enter stage left, carrying a Talking Pee-wee doll. The human son makes the Pee-wee doll dance on top of the shuttered television, as if to say, this doll will entertain your children beyond the confines of a weekly, thirty-minute episode. The boy slides the doll down the staircase banister, followed by one of the chimps, and pulls the doll’s string to show off its interactive function. One of the chimp children feeds Pee-wee a banana sandwich (peel on) from a huge bowl of bananas the chimpanzees keep on their coffee table like hard candies at grandma’s house. The jingle, sung by a dead ringer for Cyndi Lauper (who recorded the original Playhouse theme), tells children watching the commercial about the doll’s benefits: “Talkin’ Pee-wee is really coo-koo / Soon you’ll be that way too / Whatever you may do is so much fun when he’s with you / You’ll go wacko, you’ll go crazy, with talkin’ Pee-wee.” In other words, a Talking Pee-wee doll will make your kid go apeshit. Pee-wee dolls were ungovernable fresh out of the box, even before their governors broke down.

The first talking dolls were also ungovernable in their failure. Manufactured by the Edison company in 1890 to promote the phonograph, Edison’s Phonograph Doll was heavy, easily broken, terrifying to children with her “uncanny combinations of mechanical noise and inhuman wailing,” and was a commercial flop.5 It is rumored that Thomas Edison dealt with this mass of unsellable stock by burying thousands of dolls on his property, in a kind of macabre mass porcelain grave. The Edison dolls broke easily because late-nineteenth-century sound-reproduction technology was delicate and dolls are meant to be handled by clumsy children: dressed and undressed, carted around, fed, yanked or cranked, dropped, or even thrown. These broken objects masquerading as subjects scream thirsty things like “I love you” in shrieking falsettos when they should be tender and soft, an uncanniness that is part of what makes them a bit creepy.6

Dolls are meant to be played with in domestic spaces and are traditionally feminized toys in comparison to “action figures.” Chatty Cathy is perhaps the most famous pull-string talking doll, popular in the 1960s. Technically speaking, Pee-wee and Cathy dolls used similar miniature phonograph mechanisms, their pull strings look nearly identical, and both have tone arms that deliver random phrases depending on how far out their string is pulled. Pee-wee talking dolls look quite a lot like Chatty Cathy dolls. They are close in size, with hard plastic faces and limbs, and a soft torso that conceals their voice box. Cathy, however, was marketed to girls as a device that could facilitate interactive feminized play. Cathy said “I love you” and asked for care with requests like “Please change my dress.” Still, girls found disruptive forms of agency through these dolls, using them as props to assert themselves through the doll’s speech without being entirely accountable for what the doll “chose” to say.7

Queer kids playing with their Pee-wee dolls might also find ways to assert their difference through the doll’s eccentric speech and the conditions for wild play that transferred from the world of the television show to the doll’s persona. Pulling the doll’s string so it says “I know you are but what am I?” could be a ready-to-hand buffer against slights and insults, the same way kids in my schoolyard took up this bit. Used this way, a Pee-wee doll becomes miniature defender of his child-handler kin. Having a Pee-wee doll to play with was a license to be weird without having to own that weirdness as your own, because it emanated from the doll.

I wonder at the Pee-wee doll’s utterance of “I love you.” This is an homage to Chatty Cathy but somewhat out of character for Pee-wee’s cross-gender marketing strategy. “I love you” was never mentioned as a thing Pee-wee dolls said in any of the marketing materials I’ve found for the doll, though the other four phrases are all mentioned. “I love you” said to a child by their Pee-wee doll resonates as a nice, evenly tempered surprise out of the box in 1987. By the summer of 1991 and Paul Reubens’s porn theater arrest, this became an unseemly, worn-out screech to conservative parents. Pee-wee’s voice grew unintelligible and grating alongside the character’s and actor’s exile from children’s entertainment. Post-1991, “I love you,” screamed too fast by “Pee-wee the Pervert” was all bad affect, the doll cloying desperately for affection when he was no longer wanted near anyone’s kids.

Holding On

I never had a Pee-wee doll as a child. My sisters and I weren’t allowed toys that made electronic sounds. My parents weren’t Montessori devotees or anything; my mom taught kindergarten at a public school all day and she’d had enough noise by the time she got home from work. I don’t remember ever asking for a Pee-wee doll or wanting one. Looking back, I wonder if this had anything to do with shame. Being a Pee-wee fan in my schoolyard meant that you were funny and liked weird stuff. This wasn’t bad on its own but took a decidedly negative turn after Reubens’s arrest, which we all kind of understood, but poorly. Liking Pee-wee Herman after the summer of 1991 meant that you were “gay” or a “pervert,” words we didn’t totally comprehend but threw around like titillating shame bombs.

I met my first Pee-wee doll in the flesh in my mid-twenties at my friend Matthew’s apartment. This was around 2008 in Toronto’s west end, which was in the middle of a sharp gentrification, which we were part of, even though we didn’t have any money. You could still find cheap rent on sprawling apartments in “dirty mansions”—dilapidated former homes of late-nineteenth-century rail barons split into many units. We had postmillennial senses of irony shaped by nostalgia for queer pop-culture history and magnified by the affordances of YouTube and eBay. The trend in menswear toward bowties and an extremely skinny suit tailored to within an inch of its life also meant that Pee-wee, for the first time in his tenure, looked cool. Twenty years after watching Pee-wee on television as children, we wanted his suit.

I met my partner Hazel around the same time. Hazel had a bedroom and a studio in a rambling west-end apartment she shared with two roommates (Sandra Oh was her landlord). Both rooms were crammed full of tchotchkes picked from thrift stores. A Pee-wee doll sat on a high shelf and looked down on our early days together. Hazel having a Pee-wee doll signaled a certain generationally shared queer sensibility and a collector’s spirit, and made her studio seem like its own kind of playhouse I wanted to spend more time in.

All this is to say, the dolls have a charge that is bigger than “collector’s item.” This phenomenon extends far beyond my own tiny world and its niche aesthetics: a straight couple who used their doll as a comic talisman to get through breast cancer treatment in Tampa; a New Jersey man battling vandals who messed with the Pee-wee doll he keeps posed in a tree swing in his front yard to weird-up the neighborhood; my friend Lindsey Freeman who took her Pee-wee doll on vacation to the Cabazon dinosaur park in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, recreating scenes from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) that were shot there.

The dolls carry with them not just the campiness of Pee-wee fandom but a specifically queer politics of care involved in holding on to and continuing to love this bad, broken object. Queer publics are often held together by shared orientations to objects that others don’t value or dismiss as trivial. Affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich argues that queerness can be understood, in part, through this collective attachment to dismissed and derided objects that bear tremendous meaning and affective value for queer collectors.8 Holding on to a Pee-wee doll is a charged provision of care for a character whose rejection was steeped in homo- and AIDS-phobia. “Holding” also needs reclaiming from the aggro-investment bro culture that has redefined the term as unfailing commitment to keeping investment objects (crypto, streetwear) toward future wealth. Holding on to a discarded object that will simply continue to get more broken over time is a wholly different posture.

Holding on begins with acquisition. Pee-wee dolls were discontinued in 1990 as the popularity of Pee-wee’s Playhouse waned. This was the year before Reubens’s arrest, and Matchbox struggled to move remaining inventory from warehouses to retailers and consumers. Large retailers such as Toys “R” Us had already marked the $25 dolls for clearance, selling them for as little as $5. Immediately after Reubens was arrested, Toys “R” Us removed all remaining Pee-wee merchandise from shelves, deeming it incompatible with the store’s family values. There are no public records of the chain later dumping this stock on the secondhand market, though it is likely something like this happened. This mass warehousing of Pee-wee stock met heightened demand for the dolls from adult collectors, who wanted a talking, interactive Pee-wee doll precisely because of Reubens’s new queer antihero status. Al Miller, owner of Pirate’s Toy Chest in Tampa, Florida, told the St. Petersburg Times a few weeks after Reubens’s arrest that “We got nine-zillion calls [for Pee-wee dolls],” he said. “There’s always a kind of collector’s market out there for the weird stuff. If something bad happens to the character or it’s taken off the air, they really do become very valuable.”9 The talking dolls retailed for $25 in 1988, were valued at $75 in the months following the arrest, and went as high as $100 by 1992. Today they sell for between $20 and $350 dollars, depending on condition.

In the weeks following the arrest, Pee-wee dolls made several media appearances. Jim Carey, impersonating Pee-wee Herman on the sketch comedy show In Living Color, introduced a new “anatomically correct” talking Pee-wee doll modeled on Reubens’s mug shot.10 The spoof commercial models the doll’s “turbo-fist” used, we are to imagine, for frenetic feats of masturbation. Pee-wee dolls also appeared in the gay and lesbian and alternative press’s response to the overblown sex scandal. A talking Pee-wee doll fills the cover of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, arms raised in a “hands-up” gesture under the headline “FREE PEE-WEE!”11 Spectator Magazine, also from San Francisco, published a satirical photo essay titled “Pee-wee’s Shameless S.F. Sex Binge!” featuring photos of a Pee-wee doll touring the city’s many porn theaters, its human handler cropped from the frame.12

In the aftermath of Reubens’s unjust arrest for a practice that is criminalized as a technique of antigay governmentality, it is not surprising that queer people and their kin rallied around Reubens and his fictive proxy Pee-wee Herman. What is surprising about this moment is the ways talking Pee-wee dolls became stand-ins for standing with Reubens. The dolls were sticky objects for signaling participation in a wider public of fans who made a claim for the show’s significance to queer cultures. Fans claimed this object as precious and worthy of shared attachment precisely because the character was being so readily discarded. The dolls were a version of Pee-wee fans could hold, and hold on to.

Loving an object with limited animacy, such as a doll that can kind of “talk,” also practices a playhouse ethics of alternative relations between humans and objects. Returning to Eunjung Kim’s work on sex dolls, what is interesting about dolls is the ways that being with them refigures able-bodied, normative understandings of agency that define what counts as a person with a sexuality. The “radical passivity of doll agency” can lead communities that cohere around dolls to either discard them or surrender to them completely.13 This surrender can look like heavy investment in the doll, its affect, and its political potential. Media scholar Erica Rand has shown how queer adults take up Barbie dolls to help Barbie escape from the pink, candy-coated, hyper-femme world in which Mattel has confined her. Subversive play with Barbie stands in for rejection of beauty ideals and the tyranny of heterosexuality.14 As a shared object, the mass-produced Pee-wee talking doll became an affective, aesthetic, and economic talisman against the straightening impulses of childhood in the 1980s. Having and holding on to a doll is a resistant, joyful practice for queer adults who survived these harms. It also marks their adulthoods as weird, sex-positive articulations of queerness over and against emerging gay liberalism of the 1990s: don’t ask don’t tell, same-sex marriage, and lesbian Subaru commercials.

Holding on to this doll for decades in one’s home, like a year-round, slightly gayer and besuited Elf on a Shelf, matters as stewardship. Whether you grew up watching Pee-wee or got a doll as an adult in the early 1990s as a resistant practice of care or, like me, bought one on eBay more recently, the doll refuses being discarded or seeming discardable. Pee-wee dolls and their caretakers make this stand in the face of ongoing homophobic rejection, like this anachronistic 2010 appearance on a top-ten list of Bizarre Toys for Children: “given the strange circumstances under which Paul Reubens, who played Pee Wee Herman, was arrested, one wonders why any company would agree to produce a child’s doll of him. That aside, the doll itself is horrifying—it looks like a monstrous grinning clown without its red nose. The ill-fitting suit and strangely long fingers make this a doll that no parent would want for their child.” For the record, I am a parent to no one except a seventeen-pound Boston terrier, but if I did have a child, I would want this perfectly strange, long-fingered doll for them and know in my guts they’d have the imagination and capacity to feel something other than “horrified” by it.

Shrieking Together

Holding on to a Talking Pee-wee Herman doll means continuing to make space in one’s life and home for an object that is technically broken. Judging anecdotally from reading scores of online comments and eBay listings, nearly all these dolls have the same broken governor that leads to a screaming, wailing Pee-wee. This near universal “problem” makes sense given that the governor breaks from wear: the material state of a technology getting used and/or aging beyond an anticipated period of reasonable or desired use. But oh, the ways these dolls are broken, and all together! I imagine a choir of Talking Pee-wees in assembly as the gay chorus of my dreams, singing discordantly of how the decades have worn on them: a too-fast “I know you are, but what am I?” still discernible to the initiated ear.

Like most collectibles, the Pee-wee doll market takes place primarily on eBay, where dolls are offered by sellers who have come by them for many reasons. Some are collector-fans who have been holding the dolls for decades and are now downsizing. Immediately after Reubens’s death, a bump in high-priced, still-boxed, and even working dolls hit eBay as these collector-fans anticipated renewed demand motivated by nostalgia for Reubens’s most famous character. The descriptions for these pristine dolls show abiding affection on the part of sellers, including stories about buying the dolls new at K-mart in 1987 or making hard decisions to begin parting with items from their “personal collections.” The majority of dolls, though, are sold by toy and memorabilia resellers who have picked them from storage lockers, estate sales, and thrift stores, recognizing value if they can connect these wayward dolls with true fans who want to start holding dolls of their own. I like to imagine that, through this process, Pee-wee dolls move from one queer home to another, perhaps across generations: a doll is discarded for whatever reason—downsizing, death, lost interest—dropped at a thrift store, picked by a professional collector, and then sold to another fan in as-is, screeching condition.

Whether or not a given doll’s voice box works is always noted by sellers, and usually they add details about the way their doll’s broken voice sounds. Broken talking Pee-wee dolls are sometimes described as “nightmare fuel,” lumping them in with Hollywood horror dolls like Chucky or M3GAN. The broken doll I bought on eBay for research cost $20 and included the caveat, “I know this can be repaired but I’m not up for it and not to mention he scares the crap outta my kids. Lol.” Projections about children’s fears of this broken doll stand in for persistent adult discomfort with Pee-wee Herman, Paul Reubens, and the ideas about sexuality and gender this scene continues to conjure in the public imagination. In other words, this casual, jocular homophobia-meets-dad-vibes approach to describing the doll disavows what it might say about you to have collected one in the first place in order to sell it on eBay. This seller’s maneuvering away from the Pee-wee doll aligns with a renewed moment of heartbreaking antitrans and antiqueer parenting culture, most present in discourses about “grooming,” drag queen story hours, and puberty blockers. “He scares the crap outta my kids,” is shorthand for “my [cis-hetero] kids are alienated from Pee-wee’s (weird, gay) affect and so am I.”

The ungoverned voices of broken Pee-wee dolls defied expectations about what pulling the doll’s string ought to sound like, which were calibrated to knowledge about Pee-wee’s voice derived from television but also to normative ideas about the vocality of a “man in a suit.” Anticipating the pitch, timber, and speed of another’s voice is intimately bound to gendered assumptions of correlation between bodies and something like “identity.” Whiteness is often an insidious, unmarked default in popular representation and technological cultures. Technology scholar Thao Phan argues that animate technologies such as voice assistants are calibrated to this white default so they seem as unremarkable as possible.15 In other words, voice assistants Siri and Alexa sound like nice white ladies, and this is part of their promise of seamless, domestic service: they sound mature but not old, personality-less but somehow still present. Concepts such as “gay voice,” “brospeak,” and feminine “vocal fry” all stand in for how the ways we sound signal our genders and sexualities to others. Race and ability factor just as much, exemplified by the whiteness of journalistic radio and podcast voices or jokes made at the expense of disabled voices. Trans vocality is the most high-stakes example, where trans feminine folks in particular often experience threats to their safety at perceived discontinuities between appearance and sound of voice.

Trans studies scholar Andrew Anastasia writes, “How others make sense of a trans* voice, especially relative to one’s physical appearance, can provoke great anxiety or pleasure. The voice, however, does not always vector toward the word; it can pierce us in unexpected ways, turning us toward (or away from) another in an acoustic and affective register.”16 Anastasia’s words help to explain both phobic turns away from broken Talking Pee-wees as “nightmare fuel” but also the persistent attachment to these broken, screaming dolls that some of us keep. Admittedly, the feeling I got when Fran Blanche pulled her newly fixed Pee-wee doll’s string and it retracted slowly for the first time was something like calm and relief. Blanche sighs “ahhh” in response. Still, I think decades of keeping these malfunctioning dolls and pulling on their strings from time to time to hear a broken voice are ways of staying with the constellation that is Pee-wee.

Sometimes I pull my doll down from the shelf and use my pinched fingers to add manual drag to the string, trying to get the tension just right so that my Pee-wee sounds like the Pee-wee I remember. Holding on to these dolls and listening to them is a practice of refusing to forget what happened to Reubens. This refusal takes shape as a queer sort of relationship to wear and tear. We stay with these dolls, ambivalent about the possibility of perfect repair, and we do so together, as collectors, in a practice of conviviality and care for a broken object others wanted to discard.