In July 2014, an anonymous source leaked the raw audio of Britney Spears’s confessional ballad “Alien.” Haters pounced on this star’s denuded voice, gleefully seizing on the viral artifact as a smoking gun for Spears’s deficits and for the pop industry’s artistic fakeries more broadly. My paper situates this flashpoint of Spears-shaming within late-capitalist archives of public humiliation, cyberleaks, and the paternalistic scrutiny of women’s bodies and voices.

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