In her foregoing exploration of television’s closet logics, Joyrich observes that “the institutional organization of U.S. broadcasting situates television precisely on the precarious border of public and private, ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Here it constructs knowledges identified as both secret (domestically received) and shared (defined as part of a collective national culture)” (445). In other words, television’s textual contortions around homosexuality are not only akin to those of the culture at large (in Sedgwick’s terms), but also interlaced with them — and related binary hazards. The premise of my argument about Law & Order: SVU is that, in order to fully appreciate the mobilization of lesbian desire in this text, we must recognize that television (like lesbianism) is intermingled with a perilous context of diverse crises and anxieties. If, as I discussed above, television is known for destabilizing familiar boundaries, this is in part because it came of age (and has continued to develop) as the primary mass medium while the surrounding culture was in a process of profound transformation.
In an article about television as “The Suburban Home Companion” in the 1950’s, Lynn Spigel maintains that, during an era when the frontiers of (the domestic) inside and (the economic) outside were being renegotiated, “Television was caught in a contradictory movement between private and public worlds, and it often became a rhetorical figure for that contradiction” (213) — the home’s “antiseptic” “window on the world” but also a breach in its walls that lets social contagions in. Such ambivalence had gendered ramifications, as television “became a central trope for the crisis of masculinity in post-war culture” (229). Though “this fear of feminization has characterized the debates on mass culture since the nineteenth century” (229-30), of particular concern in this case was the fantasy that “television’s blurring of private and public space became a powerful tool in the hands of housewives who could use the technology to invert the sexist hierarchies at the heart of the separation of spheres” (231). The fact that this nightmare included “ways for women to control their husbands’ sexual desires through television” (231) highlights the element of erotic deviance in these transgressions.
The volatile public/private nexus is at the heart of television’s economic deployment as much as of its discursive features. “The contemporary practices of domesticity, of the ‘home,’” Streeter and Wahl write, “are an integral part of the constitution of television” (244) — and, indeed, vice versa. Crucially, these mutual influences especially intersect with contested gender relations — in ways that are not entirely new:
The idea of the living room as the center of leisure in the modern TV household is part of a broader gendered discursive practice: the discourse of the ‘consumer’... As others have observed, the industry’s view of consumers is both analogous and historically linked to Western patriarchy’s view of women. Assumptions about domestic space, and its function within a capitalist economy, are built on the gendered roles of married couples (249)
That is, the ideological and economic stability of consumer capitalism, from its inception, depended upon the segregation of public and private domains that were also always constructed as masculine and feminine, but Streeter and Wahl hold that this divide was never coherent: “in spite of all the efforts to the contrary, women became involved in the market because of the simple necessity of purchasing goods to maintain a household... This hidden economic influence hints at the fallacy of the ‘separate spheres’ theory, of the idea of a private space disengaged from the marketplace” (250-1). Bathrick traces this paradox toward the birth of television, affirming that “Above all, [the 19th century True Woman] was to preserve her home as a refuge from the marketplace, while at the same time she would grow increasingly dependent on that marketplace for its goods and services... By the 1950s the arrival of television insured an almost complete ‘occupation’ of the private by the public” (100). So, an already rich ambivalence about the literal and symbolic role of women in the economy, particularly in relation to the consumption of mass culture, took on new intensities when television entered the picture.
These social circumstances also inflect TV’s epistemological landscapes. Streeter and Wahl point out that the mutual constitution of gendered spheres and consumer economics is inseparable from the same sorts of analytic uncertainties about viewers that plague television studies: “The social fact and assumption of viewing in the domestic space... is one of the principle ways that the industry solves what Gitlin calls ‘the problem of knowing,’ that is, the difficulty of organizing centralized program production given an invisible and diverse broadcast audience” (248). As for the critics themselves, Joyrich notes that “disputes over the gendered subject — women’s place in the public and private spheres — have been complemented by similar disputes over the subject of reception — women’s place within the discourses of and about television” (RR 5). If, as Joyrich maintains, “television as it is currently organized gears its specific textuality and viewer/text engagement toward a goal quite consonant with capitalist patriarchy — the encouragement of consumption,” the figure of women as the “primary consumer[s] in our society” (RR 40) is necessarily refracted through all facets of the project of televisual representation and inquiry.
As Bathrick observes, “the new [post-war] economic reality that... middle-class women, wives and mothers were entering the labour force as never before” (100) was an especially fraught node in these gendered networks, and the professional woman became a privileged emblem of the anxieties stimulated around the shifting public/private border. According to Streeter and Wahl’s introduction to the topic:
The category of the ‘working woman’ gets its meaning, not straight from life, but by way of other categorizations and their contradictions... ‘working women’ are not women who work, but women who work in a way that takes them across a perceived social boundary that violates certain received social expectations... relating to certain felt tensions and struggles over the role of women within social life; if there is a connection between the political-economic and aesthetic dimensions of television, it is not because the former mechanically imprints itself on the latter, but in terms of those tensions and struggles. (243)
That is, as television is thoroughly entangled with the gendered contradictions and transgressions that crisscross public and private realms, the similarly laden figure of the working woman is necessarily interwoven with the televisual terrain. The professional woman, in literal terms, exploded onto the television scene with the hugely popular Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970 (after the actual transformation of women‚Äôs participation in the workforce had been underway for more than two decades, as Bathrick points out). This and other initial portrayals (Rabinovitz identifies ten ‚Äúfeminist sitcoms‚Äù before 1985 [146]) were predictably ambivalent, manifesting, as Bathrick puts it, ‚Äúthe historical and ideological mandate for keeping the familial intact‚Äù (105) via ‚Äúanother, albeit more ‚Äòresponsive‚Äô, commitment to family values‚Äù (103) displaced onto the ‚Äúworkplace family.‚Äù At the same time, representing the domestic (or, indeed, erotic) concerns proper to femininity within the public professional setting was often an insurmountably thorny proposition: a 1971 article ‚Äúasserts that working women portrayed on TV are never granted private lives and that mothers are denied any relationship to the workplace‚Äù (102). Lentz argues that, additionally, typical discourses around these programs translated feminist struggles against such double binds into ‚Äútelevision‚Äôs struggle for legitimation‚Äù (50), a move that ‚Äúrelies simultaneously upon freeing television from its femininity and conferring new value on that femininity‚Äù (51). This strategic maneuvering demonstrates, again, that the uncertainties posed by the changing status of women, and by the disruptive working woman in particular, are bound up with uneasiness around television itself that it must navigate and contain. Finally, Lauren Rabinovitz recognizes that ‚ÄúNetwork programming executives initially became interested in ‚Äòfeminist programming‚Äô in the early 1970s because it was good business,‚Äù given ‚Äúan important national shift in audience‚Äù (145) toward the young female professional as the new privileged consumer. In this metatextual sense, too, television‚Äôs position vis ?† vis women's roles is inextricable from the complicated relations of capitalism and working girls.
Inhabiting the borderlands of several critical oppositions (e.g. public/private, masculine/feminine), these negotiations inevitably intersect with erotic peril and discipline (as Sedgwick suggests they must). The phantasmatic association of lesbian deviance with female independence and liberation predates both television and the concurrent socioeconomic transformations that brought the majority of women into the workplace in the decades after WWII. In the television age, the specter of transgressive same-sex desire continues to haunt profoundly conflicted portrayals of the working woman. Sasha Torres remarks on “the televisual tendency to use feminism and lesbianism as stand-ins for each other” (177) across the industry’s various attempts to capitalize on feminism’s potential demographic appeal. She argues that this deployment performed contradictory functions, vacillating between representing the lesbian character (beginning with Marilyn McGrath on the hospital drama HeartBeat) as the “privileged signifier of feminism” and thus like other women, and as fundamentally different from other women to “ease the ideological threat... by localizing the homosexuality which might otherwise pervade these homosocial spaces” (179). In other words, the architecture of the closet reasserts itself over the figure of the feminist or professional woman as the impulse to simultaneously incorporate and displace her violation of the culture’s constitutive boundaries.
In a study of the politics of “feminist sitcoms” across several decades, Rabinovitz too claims that “women desiring women [is] the repressed aspect of female friendship throughout these programs” (151). In the case of Murphy Brown in the early 1990s, the ambivalence of connotation is again apparent as the character’s “assertiveness, independence, brassiness, and 'smart mouth,' as well as her tailored and even sometimes androgynous wardrobe, may suggest her capacity as a lesbian or figure for lesbian identification while references to her active, ongoing heterosexual life and desire undercut such signifiers” (160). I’d like to point out that this is strikingly similar to how lesbian-oriented fans describe Olivia, and the oscillation between the eruption and erasure of lesbian desire turning on her in SVU. The AfterEllen.com article observes that Olivia is
one of the few characters on TV to exhibit what are often considered to be dyke characteristics — with short hair, a leather jacket, and a gun at her hip, Olivia sits with legs apart, commanding the space around her. She is the protector of the victims who come through her department, a strong woman in a profession filled with men, and often physically or verbally dominates “perps.” Her uniform includes t-shirts, sweaters, slacks and sensible shoes — no heels, no frills, and little jewelry except for what appears to be a man’s watch.
Notably, these qualities (like Murphy’s) have, in and of themselves, nothing to do with sex between women. What they do imply is these characters’ contravention of the bounds of properly feminine aesthetics and activities, the challenge to stable hierarchies of gender that inheres in their role as successful, independent professionals. Because Sedgwick’s theory of the closet reveals that the homo/hetero frontier is inextricable from other foundational binaries, because television itself and the pleasure we take in it as consumers are deeply implicated in cultural changes that generate ever-intensifying anxieties about such divisions, the apparition of lesbian desire (both dangerous and exciting) prowls the televisual realm. This is the first sense in which I claim that Olivia’s lesbianism is indelibly “in” the television text, rooted in the most elemental interactivities constraining the representation of women on television, in a way that no amount of onscreen boyfriends could ever contain or erase.
rape is “a crime ideally suited to television” (quoted in Cuklanz 16)
I am transposing Olivia into a genealogy of feminist sitcoms featuring professional women, but it is equally significant that her character is located within a distinct textual milieu: the cop/detective program — a form that Fiske describes as “the primary masculine television genre” (Cuklanz 18). Since, as Fiske puts it, “’most masculine texts’ eliminate ‘the most significant cultural producers of the masculine identity — women, work, and marriage’” (Cuklanz 19), it follows that the portrayal of women and private (i.e. feminine) concerns like romance is especially conflicted here. Lisa Cuklanz identifies an economically-motivated shift in the textual orientation of detective shows, writing that “In the 1980s the genre became more and more similar to the soap opera, with the aim of attracting a broad-based, mixed-gender audience... the form and content of crime dramas became increasingly feminized” (24) — but such hybridization may exacerbate rather than alleviate the tensions plaguing this televisual version of separate spheres.
In her book Rape on Prime Time, Cuklanz provides the interesting statistic that, several high-profile sitcom episodes aside, crime shows accounted for approximately 87% of rape-themed narratives on prime time TV between 1976 and 1990 (out of about100 — that’s if you include L.A. Law’s 9) (23). In “Epistemology of the Console,” Joyrich also suggests (less empirically) that there may be a privileged affinity between detective programs and deviant erotics. She argues that a common mode of representing homosexuality on television is via “a logic of detection and discovery — in which hints of sexuality are offered as clues to be traced,” which is particularly evident in “the hermeneutic of suspicion found in several cop/detective shows that are characterized by their direct enactment of the drive to know” (452). In her words, “the very narrative of the detective program incites a desire to solve its enigmas, be these criminal or sexual — or frequently... a conflation of both” (453). Thus, the imminence of investigating sex and the project of knowledge more broadly is operating here at full capacity.
I’d like to propose, therefore, that the epistemological engagement with sexual deviance and violence, at its most extreme in TV’s abundant crime plots thematizing rape, is connected to the more diffuse boundary transgressions I discussed above as constitutive of the detective genre (and of television itself). In an article on rape in the media, Sarah Projansky notes that “rape narratives historically often linked rape to women’s independence” (97), and that a typical device was “a woman [who] faces rape because of her desire to access her equal right to a masculine career” (102). That is, the same figure — the empowered professional woman — tends to be, on television, both the fulcrum of lesbian anxieties and the target of sexual violence. Depictions of rape (sexual violence) and homosexual desire (sexual deviance), women’s crossings between the home and the workplace, and televisual havoc with the gendered perimeters of public and private are discourses that are all intimate with each other. Moreover, Projansky claims that the “paradox of discursively increasing (and potentially eliciting pleasure in) the very thing a text is working against” (96) is active in the media’s treatments of rape, wherein a violent erotics is represented with the explicit purpose of “educating” viewers about it as a social evil, but functions simultaneously as a titillating incitement to watch. Rape as a subject of television, then, is situated at the charged nexus of sexuality, gender, knowledge, and economics, where it is often the most treacherous aspects of these highly contested domains that are the most valuable commodities. I locate the second sense in which I claim that Olivia is a lesbian in the unavoidable homoerotic reverberations of the sex detective’s epistemological project and television’s social and commercial project, across the various levels of an intertextual field.
Which brings me, finally, to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a program that is unique in making manifest this underlying connection between the most masculine genre and the most private form of violence by dealing almost exclusively with “sexually-based offenses.” Resonances between its stated epistemological mandate to search out the truths of criminal sexuality and a televisually-inflected vigilance around more subterranean investments in family and heteronormativity are typical of SVU, and I’d like to illustrate some of these structuring principles through a detailed discussion of a single episode. This episode, “Sacrifce” (3.7/#50), which involves a case of gay misidentification, is not classified as one of SVU’s “handful of gay-related episodes” by AfterEllen.com. And, as author Angie B. points out, “it seems odd that in five seasons, no lesbian or bisexual women have been featured characters” — a telling absence in a series that has had to treat an imaginative smorgasbord of perversions in order to fill, to date, more than 100 episodes. I have argued that lesbian desire has an especially troubled relationship to shows that feature professional women, and I’d suggest that this apparent reluctance to include it in the range of sexual themes that SVU mediates for the television public is symptomatic of the hazardous undertow of lesbian desire pulling at the show already, which it would be risky for the program to scrutinize too closely. If “Sacrifce” is necessarily not an officially lesbian text, then, nor is it one of the episodes that make frequent appearances in fan dialogue about onscreen “subtext” between Olivia and Alex (first and foremost, “Loss”). In choosing “Sacrifice” as my example, in other words, I’m examining an episode that has only a tangential connection to this paper’s topic of Olivia as lesbian object and subject. I’m interested in analyzing how the logics of SVU overall set up epistemological frameworks that put forward this possibility, even when it doesn’t surface in obvious ways. “Sacrifice” demonstrates how homosexuality tends to alternately emerge and disappear in conjunction with violence, family crisis, consumerism and spectacle, and epistemological uncertainty more generally.
“Sacrifice” opens with what we might imagine is a stereotypical scene from gay life: a crowd of men loitering outside a bar, as two negotiate their first date. Just as they are making plans to continue the evening, gunshots ring out, and the incipient romance is disrupted. This sort of association of transgressive (in this case, homosexual) desire with violence is obviously constitutive of SVU as a show about sex crimes. When the shots go off, one of the men pulls his gun and dashes away — he’s a cop, we are to assume, so personal life is also interrupted by the professional, here.
Next, this gay officer (called Steve) meets up with Olivia and her partner Elliot at the hospital where the unconscious gunshot victim was taken. Their conversation establishes, first of all, the detectives’ fluency with the city’s licentious gay subculture, perhaps a necessary part of their purview as “panty police” (or, one might speculate, a particular competency of Olivia’s, as she does most of the talking). Steve informs them he believes he spotted the victim in “Puffy’s” (near the scene of the crime), and Olivia responds with surprise, “Inside the bar?” “I was on a date,” Steve confesses, clarifying what he was doing in what she evidently knows to be a gay establishment, and activating the significance of inside vs. outside so characteristic of the closet. Elliot’s main role is to ask, after they’ve gotten the facts out of the way, if Steve “wants a little discretion on this,” making clear the intersection of this incident with the figures of the homophobic police department and the closeted gay cop (where we can’t help wondering about Olivia).
The initial phase of their investigation reveals several assumptions typical of the hermeneutics of SVU’s sex detectives. First, the unit is involved because “copious fluids” were found (in the victim), raising the suspicion of gang rape — as if any non-normative sexual behavior (in this case, having multiple partners) must be the result of violence. Second, their reading of the victim as gay, which you’ll recall is based solely on the location of the crime (as they’re presuming the sex with men was non-consensual), is unshaken when they note he’s wearing a wedding ring. “If he’s in a committed relationship,” Elliot muses, to which Olivia replies derisively, “He was in a meat market bar. Let’s hope his partner’s more committed than he is” — they rely here on stereotypical models of homosexual partnerships (both positive and negative) to interpret the evidence. Third, they immediately verify that the victim has no prior arrests for solicitation (i.e. prostitution), cluing us in to an implicit connection between (homo)sexual criminality and commercialism. Fourth, Detective Munch’s opinion is that “Good money’s on a hate crime. Perps are usually hetero or closeted and in denial,” referencing an awareness of the very real violence that can be provoked by the closet’s oppressive architecture. And most importantly, what the discussion of the facts of the case among the SVU team exhibits is that their procedures for investigating sex consist in large part of applying imagination to the evidence to tell speculative stories that fit the crime (e.g. Elliot’s: “maybe he was cheating, went out, picked up the wrong guys in the meat market”). One might say that the pleasure of being a detective (particularly for those detectives playing along in the audience) lies in this creative exercise of conjecture.
The problem with SVU's hypothetical account of the crime, in this instance, is that the victim won’t accommodate his tale to theirs. When Olivia and Elliot finally catch up with the elusive Wesley at his apartment he is uncooperative, and denies he was raped. The detectives are incredulously confronting him with the “evidence” when his wife and daughter walk in. In this instant juxtaposition of a narrative of gay violence with a portrait of nuclear normativity, the detectives’ (and the audience’s) interpretation is thrown into fatal disarray (in the sort of entertaining plot twist that advances virtually every episode of SVU). This is the first transposition of the episode, from a sordid saga of homosexual, subcultural sex and violence to a drama of an ordinary family threatened — and I would argue that the combination is not coincidental. The connection is emphasized by an initial period of confusion when it seems that Wesley’s family might be endangered precisely by gay desire. When the detectives question him back at the station, there’s this exchange:
Wesley: “No one raped me.”
Elliot: “Then how do you explain the semen inside of you — was it consensual?”
Wesley: “I’m married, I’ve got a kid.”
Olivia: “Look, lots of people hit for both teams. Now either you were forced, or you weren’t.”
Wesley: “OK, I’m bisexual. Are we done?”
All the unmappable territories of marital (in)fidelity, sexual orientation, the closet, the sexual body, and consent converge here in a hermeneutic sinkhole that renders rape stubbornly indefinable in the binary terms that Olivia insists should characterize it. In her potent line, retaining the absolute opposition between forced and consensual sex dictates abandoning the one segregating desire into homo and hetero (not an insignificant maneuver given that this is our culture‚Äôs structuring premise, as Sedgwick conceives it). In evidence also is the potential boomerang effect of the vague ‚Äúlots of people‚Äù: when Olivia is the one who defends transgressive erotics (as she often is, the foil to her more conservative partner), there‚Äôs always the risk that her sympathy will be viewed as a subtle suggestion about her own sexuality. Olivia presses Wesley for the ‚Äútruth‚Äù with benevolent frustration that he won‚Äôt allow SVU to ‚Äúhelp‚Äù him, demonstrating an axiom of SVU‚Äôs investigative logics (and those of the culture at large, perhaps): people ‚Äî and television characters ‚Äî don‚Äôt often willingly offer up the verities of their desire; this knowledge can only be produced through vigilant observation and inquest. So, at this point in ‚ÄúSacrifice,‚Äù the figure of a family in crisis momentarily overlaps with the concurrent difficulties of delineating both desire (which appears mystifyingly bisexual rather than stably homosexual) and violence ‚Äî and hence also with the fissures in the supposedly rock solid reality of rape itself, the show‚Äôs ostensible raison d‚Äô?™tre (as Olivia expresses their dilemma: ‚Äúwithout a complaining witness [the rape] doesn‚Äôt exist‚Äù).
Much of this murkiness is conveniently cleared up, though, when there’s a break in the case: it turns out Wesley is a gay porn star. In what I’m identifying as the episode’s second transposition, another suspect confirms that their “victim” is “not gay... Wesley’s strictly gay for pay at 1500 bucks a bang,” and any exploration of homosexual (or even bisexual) desire, whether violent or consensual, quite effectively vanishes from the episode as the detectives wholeheartedly adopt this rather simplistic explanation. Thus, homosexuality as the episode’s framing perversion is displaced (quite baldly, I’d say) onto the commercialization and spectacularization of sexuality, the moral debate transferred from the peccadilloes of (married, closeted) homosexuals to those of pornographers. Whether Wesley is a closeted homo or a closeted porn star, however, the effects of the closet are still in force. The detectives aren’t surprised that Wesley refused to come clean, and Tutuola states the obvious: “a straight guy wouldn’t want the world to know he’s doing gay porn.” The SVU team’s own ambivalence about pornographic eroticism easily matches their tribulations policing homosexual desire. In a subsequent interview, Elliot tetchily reminds Wesley that “Pornography isn’t illegal. Making it isn’t illegal” (establishing that, in this episode of SVU, there isn’t any bona fide sex crime involved), but Wesley highlights the pique in his tone over the reassurance in his words when he responds, “I see the way you’re looking at me. I’m scum because I make money having sex.” Later, Alex goes to court to remove his daughter from her parents, on the grounds that “pornography is a form of legal prostitution. The minor’s physical, mental, and emotional welfare was corrupted... [by] exposing her to an environment of wanton sexual activity.” These attitudes are representative of how SVU’s narrative language is shaped by imperatives of normative containment as much as by the legal enforcement of sexuality, whether the deviance in question is homosexuality or another eminently substitutable threat to the conventional family.
The pivotal revelation of Wesley’s reluctant stardom comes out simultaneously in two interviews that are intercut with each other as SVU personnel watch through one-way mirrors. Shooting scenes through windows or showing people watching through windows, particularly during interrogations at the station, is a signature visual device of SVU. One that could be interpreted as a self-reflexive commentary on television itself (“Your Window on the World”): an allusion to the privileged point of view of the audience, and to the affinity of this position with the diagetic detective work. The new pornography angle is, of course, even more insistently self-reflexive (as are all SVU episodes that feature a videotape of a sex crime). When Olivia expresses incredulity about the suspect’s gay porn story, he volunteers “I could screen the film for you if you’d like.” The detectives don’t respond, but the unfulfilled promise of explicit images hovers over the rest of the episode, functioning both to differentiate SVU’s text from porn (educating us about the difference between good sex TV and bad sex TV), and simultaneously to destabilize this very distinction — as SVU is obviously portraying porn (albeit with some delicacy) even as it condemns it. Elliot and Olivia drop in on a porn set, where the camera tracks tightly behind them as they stride through a labyrinthine corridor from the respectable outer office into the sordid interior, passing by the video equipment and crew before they stop short, their backs framing a tableau of Wesley’s wife Jaina, in a tawdry maid’s outfit, kneeling on the floor between two buff, shirtless men — a titillating picture indeed. On their second visit, the shots track across the literal border between realist illusion and televisual apparatus, crossing walls sporting lifelike domestic interiors on one side and scaffolding, machinery, and lounging talent on the other. The flick’s director goads Olivia by asking her, “You ever thought about doing a movie? You look like you’d be a real natural” — calling attention, perhaps, to her actual existence onscreen in a show about sex. In summary, then, “Sacrifice” serves as an example of the ways SVU’s language of investigation mediates the normative, as well as criminal, boundaries of sexual acts and desires, mobilizing critical ambivalences at the multivalent intersections of (homo)sexuality and perversion, family and eroticism, consent and violence, sex and consumerism, private acts and public performance, truth and simulation, revelation and concealment — a diagetic network of structuring ambiguities that reverberates intertextually and metatextually as well.
After the first time [Alex] wondered whether people could tell. She had gay friends who would play “lesbian/straight?” over coffee as if there were secret signs, visible only to women in the know. And maybe there was something in that. She wondered if she exhibited such signs...
When Olivia is near she feels the whole world watching... “We should be more careful,” she says, watching the squad room for signs of interest. “We shouldn't... not where everyone can see us”... sometimes she wonders if they know already. There's not much that escapes a detective in sex crimes.
~ from “Objects in the Mirror” by CGB
Most importantly, my discussion of “Sacrifice” outlines the hermeneutic strategies that are the currency of SVU’s onscreen detectives but also of the competencies of its audience. That is, by relentlessly thematizing the investigation of desire through watching for signs, searching for clues, interrogating recalcitrant suspects, and fabricating plausible stories to fit the evidence, SVU is training its viewers to do the same. I’ve argued that the suggestion of Olivia’s lesbianism is insistently activated by the gendered logics of televisual representation overall, and their interpenetration with the precarious homo/hetero binary. And I’ve argued that SVU as a text demonstrates this topography in its narratives, which symptomatically interweave the quest for truth and justice with the search for the elusive frontier where normal sexuality and relationships cross into deviance, perversion, and violence, where private acts and desires cross into the public discourse of crime and the televisual spectacularization and commodification of sex. Additionally, I’m claiming here that SVU actively invites its viewers to scrutinize these contradictory fields of overlap for the illicit specters that haunt them — its marketability depends, after all, on the pleasure of learning the ways of sex detectives. Given a series whose premise is discovering clandestine sexual transgressions, how can we not be ever-vigilant, as an audience, for even the subtlest signs and clues. This exercise expands as fans convene their own detective squads, collectively reviewing the facts and producing explanatory narratives in their own gratifying inquests.
As the debates that inaugurated this paper amply illustrate, though, these multifarious investigations of course come to divergent conclusions about SVU’s erotic enigmas. While television’s formal configuration dictates that each of the program’s diagetic mysteries is more or less solved by the end of the episode, real-life sexual hermeneutics by nature never reaches such closure. Sedgwick offers one approach to the roiling complexity of the forces that permanently defer the resolution of closet-inflected questions like ‘is she or isn’t she’ when she observes that “Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons” (4). That is, remaining ignorant can be as vigorous a procedure as seeking knowledge, and, according to Sedgwick, “Such ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking enforcements — perhaps especially around sexuality” (her germane example is “The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape”) (5). The processes involved, then, in enabling some viewers (and, one might speculate, producers, actors, etc.) to not know of Olivia’s lesbian desires are as dynamic and robust as those arrangements that I’ve maintained induce these desires to be sought out and seen. Given, also, the multiple subject positions TV always makes available (for both formal and economic reasons) by necessarily leaving all its representations (especially of sexuality) open-ended and incomplete (to varying degrees), the fact that televisual lesbianism is selectively imperceptible is no proof that it isn’t there. This differential geography of visibility is, however, a sign of the saturation of the landscapes of text, audience, and social context with the aporetic logics of the closet, provoking unpredictable oscillations within and between strata that keep these vistas in a state of perpetual excitation.
And no one is more excited, evidently, than the communities of fans who see Olivia in an erotic relationship with Alex or other female characters (or, of course, with themselves). These interpretive networks synthesize and rework SVU’s onscreen languages to articulate the results of their libidinal investigations. Shaping this process is a critical awareness, first of all, of the televisual constraints circumscribing the portrayal of sexuality — particularly, I’ve emphasized, at the perilous junction of women and the workplace, and in “masculine” genres. Angie B. reiterates the widespread recognition that the generic conditions of this detective series dictate that “the show deliberately does not focus on the personal lives of its characters.” This attribute incites and justifies disproportionately intensive deductive formulas: in the rubric of one group, for example, “one drink” between characters in the diagetic realm equates to a sexual liaison, once you control for the program’s acute representational restraint.
Moreover, I’d contend that many fans are also consciously engaged with the ways the more enfolding contortions of the closet manipulate the visibility of lesbian eroticism, both on- and offscreen. One fan fiction author, LostinTranslation, had this to say about the inspiration for the novelette “Held Within the Beat of Your Heart”:
SVU is a television series about crimes involving sex that rarely explores sexuality itself. Often times SVU traffics in stories involving extreme sexuality, but the underpinnings for such forms of sexual expression are rarely considered beyond a simple psychology that is often heavily moralized. Too often on SVU sexuality is understood within an uncomplicated dynamic of direct cause and effect. Of course, this is nonsense. With Held, I wanted to write a story about a sex crime and sexual expression, I also wanted to write a story in which the two topics would collide in unpleasant ways. I picked a horrific situation because I wanted to use such a thing as the most unlikely of backdrops for a love story. (personal correspondence)
In other words, Lost’s work is a response to some of the limitations, contradictions, and erasures that mark SVU’s texts, to the inescapable infusion of the show’s lexicon with normative hierarchies of power that are often rigid and binarized. Lost’s project is to deliberately and interactively formulate an alternative vocabulary that reveals the intimacies that SVU attempts to repress between opposing terms like natural and criminal sexuality, romantic and violent erotics.
While I wouldn’t claim (as I did with “Sacrifice”) that “Held” is at all typical of slash fiction about Olivia, I do believe it exhibits many of the discursive principles I consider characteristic of this genre — often in an especially prominent or drastic form. “Held” recounts the aftermath of a horrific, almost unthinkable crime: Olivia and Alex have been kidnapped, and our heroine is forced by their captors to sexually violate Alex. While this assault is both an extreme instance and a patent echo of the “sexually-based offenses” SVU presents each week, the text emphasizes that this was one case that was “kicked under the rug as soon as possible” (pt. 1). In a striking contrast (one the characters perceive as well) to SVU’s customarily zealous detective work, bloody clothes from the scene are given back to the women to be destroyed, and Tutuola “accidentally” wrecks the camera that the perps used to record their brutality (a figure for the television camera, perhaps) — these are “evidence no one wanted to process” (pt. 2). As in the series itself, it is clear that the specter of Olivia and Alex having sex exceeds the bounds of the detectives’ epistemological capabilities, and all signs that indicate this prospect must be hastily recontained.
“Held” highlights the precariousness of the boundaries of consent and perversion that SVU for the most part works to shore up. Alex’s determination to convince Olivia that she isn’t a rapist is a key element of the story’s plot; when Alex first asserts that she “wasn't raped,” Olivia bitterly counters that the hospital did a rape kit (pt. 1). By turning to “standard procedure” to classify their experience, Olivia makes manifest the inadequacy of the juridical infrastructure that provides SVU’s discursive framework. Alex, in Lost’s version, has decidedly kinky tastes that were sickeningly parodied in her non-consensual submission at the hands of the kidnappers. In the course of confessing her proclivities to Olivia, they have this conversation:
“There's one other thing, isn't there?”
Her breath leaving her body in a panic, Alex tried a joke. “No wonder the perps confess to you.”
Olivia almost missed it. She stopped from denying their conversation was an interrogation by only a split second. Instead she responded to the assumption underneath Alex's bantering.
“Alex, you're not a perp.”
“Are you sure?” (pt. 4)
That is, any hint of sexual deviance, even on the windward side of consensuality, brings the weight of the sex police’s criminalizing logics down upon them. The fact that it takes such an excruciating journey through physical and emotional violation to bring these characters to the point where they can love each other and still say “We’re not monsters” (pt. 6) calls attention to the ways the closet architecture operating in SVU and in its televisual and social context circumscribes the desires that can freely emerge — and demonstrates fans’ engagement with these mortal constraints in their own readings.
If, as I have argued, the sexual violence that SVU investigates is linked to the discursive violence of the border wars that televisual lesbianism epitomizes, "Held” literalizes this connection. The atrocity of the circumstances that bring Olivia and Alex together seems to suggest that the barrier keeping them apart is so potent that it could only be breached by an act of unspeakable brutality. The fact that, here, Olivia and Alex’s first sexual experience together is actually an assault recodes the ideologically-charged indictment of slash as “character rape” because it is “a total violation of established characterizations” (Jenkins 466). It is relatively axiomatic in Olivia fan fiction that she and/or Alex are hindered in expressing their desire for each other by their professions or backgrounds — just as on the series any exploration of their personal lives is almost completely precluded. Following the contours of this loaded configuration, “Held” stipulates that Olivia and Alex weren’t romantically involved and never communicated their love before they were abducted. Referencing the diagetic restrictions and intensities that draw the outlines of their relationship, Lost writes that, in Olivia’s opinion, “Keeping a distance between herself and her investigators could only help Alex maintain her professional integrity,” and as a result, “In all the years they’d known one another, last night's dinner [the occasion of their kidnapping] was probably only the fourth or fifth time they’d dined together without Elliot playing the role of the unacknowledged chaperone” (pt. 1). Thus, the despotic vectors that obstruct Olivia and Alex’s desire on TV are translated into a fictional labyrinth of agonizing violation and guilt from whence our heroines, in the end, triumphantly emerge.
Giving poignancy to the women’s original enforced distance in the story is a recurring motif of each of the characters remembering watching the other. Many of these memories are, in fact, recapitulations of favorite onscreen moments from episodes of SVU: among Olivia’s, “the night she and Elliot surprised [Alex] while she was out on a date, her hair up and dressed in a stunning red cocktail dress;... arguing about a case in the hallway outside her office” (pt. 3); among Alex’s, “Olivia incongruously dressed in a shimmering black evening dress, standing next to her in front of the window looking into an interrogation room, their fingers accidentally brushing” (pt. 6). The latter passage continues, “Memories segued into fantasies: Olivia and she walking down a corridor and Olivia suddenly pushing her against the wall and claiming her mouth in a kiss, Olivia showing up late one night at her apartment and taking her from behind as she lay sprawled over the dining room table” (pt. 6). That is, observation and imagination, television and fiction, slide effortlessly into one another, often in the substance of a single event: Alex confesses, “The other night when I asked you out to dinner, I was half pretending it was a date” (pt. 3) — echoing in a more hopeful erotics the rich leveling economies correlating various planes of sexual violence.
As I have theorized SVU as a TV program (along with commentators like Sally Forth and Angie B.), the elements that conspire to render Olivia unrepresentable as a lesbian onscreen are ultimately extratextual: our culture’s pervasive homophobia; the economic imperative to appeal to a mass audience; the gendered hazards bequeathed to television by historical hierarchies and transformations; the insidious ubiquity of the closet. Fan fiction stories like “Held,” however, transpose the impediments to Olivia and Alex’s romance from outside the text to inside the characters’ psyches, reconstituting these oppressions as their individual fears and inhibitions. Even when fics thematize, as they often do, Olivia or Alex’s struggle with prejudice or internalized homophobia, these conditions are still located as hang-ups that, while they may seethe with acknowledged violence, can be processed and (usually) overcome inter/personally. Simultaneously, “Held” (and many other stories) also transpose the fans’ procedures of watching (obsessive scrutiny of the characters’ attire, vigilance for suspect looks and touches), as well as their tendency to fantasize about what they see, into the heads of the characters, converting the viewers’ competencies as sex detectives into Olivia and Alex’s erotic waltz. What appears is a kind of machine for collapsing TV’s divergent registers into each other — and it is in this interactive destabilization of the ostensibly obvious perimeters distinguishing text, audience, and metatext that lesbian desire in the televisual sense operates. Olivia can be my girlfriend, likewise, in my own libidinous interface with these perpetual flows of meaning wherein SVU episodes, industry gossip, and fan production penetrate and transform each other.
After previewing selections from this paper while it was a work in progress, Sally Forth jokingly told me that she “Can't wait to get to the ‘Olivia is really gay’ part” (personal correspondence). As I come to the concluding section, my readers will doubtless realize (if I haven’t made it amply explicit already) that there is no such part. Certainly, to some degree I myself wish, like any similarly invested fan (or any detective), that I could irrefutably prove my allegation. My intellectual enterprise in this paper, however, has been to establish that any evidence that might be tendered toward such a hypothetically unassailable outcome is always already ensnared in the swirling vortex of the closet, wherein the secret truths of (homo)sexuality are simultaneously exposed and effaced in relentless eddies, inseparable as they are from the spirals of knowledge and pleasure constitutive of television as a mass cultural commodity. Thus I am caught, too, between fannish zeal and scholarly rigor, between (at the risk of waxing heavy-handed with my metaphors) my impractically proximate desk and television. I maintain, though, that it is ultimately in such irresolvable tensions, in the incessant intertextual transmutations among divergent terms and registers, that the most fruitful prospects for knowledge, pleasure (and of course, profit) lie.
If, in one sense, this paper is a colossal tease for those who may seek purchase to confirm, once and for all, that Olivia is a lesbian, in another, this ardent critical endeavor has been the supreme erotic encounter between Olivia (my fellow detective) and I, in defiance of the frontier dividing the real world from the one on the (TV or computer) screen — and what could be more substantial proof that Olivia swings my way than that? To clarify, I don’t mean to fall back on the position that Olivia is finally most gay in viewers’ readings of her as such, but rather to locate the reality of televisual lesbianism in the ceaseless churning between audiences and texts, public and private, masculine and feminine, fact and fantasy (and the rest). As a node in the diffuse online network of Olivia fandom, this paper too has permeable borders, and is promiscuously open to new interfaces and to continual expansion and reconfiguration. The epistemological and erotic connections it will or won’t cultivate with fans, with academics, with the whole encompassing machine of televisual interpretation, only now begin to be generated.
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