In her introduction to the recent anthology Televising Queer Women, Rebecca Beirne opens by reiterating calls "over the years [by] the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities... [for] fairer and more accurate representation of LGBT people on television" (1). This "politics of visibility" has its place, and I wouldn't want to belittle the importance of the "gay character" in an evolving screen economy, or her veneration by deprived queer viewers. However, such pervasive appeals for positive representation depend on drastically simplified and impoverished notions of visibility, sexuality, and community, none of which are "knowable" as naturally as this formulation seems to assume. "LGBT people" never transparently and unambiguously appear, and this is even more so "on television" -- if, in fact, it is even possible to fully distinguish what is "on television" from what is not. This rich indeterminacy is at the heart of Eve Sedgwick's intervention in Epistemology of the Closet, which investigates how, around the turn of the 20th century, the homosexual/heterosexual binary was transformed into the privileged, obligatory taxonomy for classifying all persons and all permutations of sexuality. Not only did this discourse manage crisis in the realm of sexual demarcation, it was also entangled with an array of other constitutively modern predicaments, among them knowledge/ignorance, public/private, inside/outside, and masculine/feminine. Because "the structuring of same sex bonds [is] a site of intensive regulation that intersects virtually every issue of power and gender" (2-3), the borders of heterosexuality and homosexuality are incessantly policed (for their own sake and for the sake of the other fraught domains they intersect), but they can never be definitively stabilized. The closet is Sedgwick's figure for this profoundly contradictory organizing principle, not only of sexual identity, but of all oscillations of secrecy and disclosure that are primordially filtered through the "one particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy" (73). The exasperating and oppressive paradoxes of the closet, wherein that which is unknowable, unspeakable, and invisible is at the same time relentlessly studied, discussed, and represented (and vice versa), are emblematic of "the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualizing same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity; an incoherence that answers, too, to the incoherence with which heterosexual desire and identity are conceptualized" (82). The primordial interdependence of binary terms, whose opposition is at the same time axiomatic and irresolvably oscillating, produces an experience of being "bayoneted through and through... by the vectors of a disclosure at once compulsory and forbidden" and tyrannized by "an excruciating system of double binds" (70). This aporetic logic is all the more insistent when operating within the already highly compromised and overdetermined domain of TV representation.
Lynne Joyrich's article "Epistemology of the Console" offers a comprehensive model of how epistemology and consumption are fundamentally intertwined with sexuality in the televisual economy. Her premise is that "U.S. television both impedes and constructs, exposes and buries, a particular knowledge of sexuality" (440) as one of its structuring projects, to the point that "the closet becomes an implicit TV form" (450). The incessant swinging of the closet door (445) is an effect of the ways television relies on homosexuality as "the sexuality produced precisely as obstacle, necessarily inside and outside the televisual domain... [its] disclosure seemingly compulsory yet forbidden, demanded yet contained" (449). Like most scholars of queer representation and reception, Joyrich observes that the media have managed homosexual desire through deliberate ambiguity, with contradictory consequences: "Held 'definitionally in suspense' through connotation, homosexuality became impossible either to confirm or to disprove, with the unsettling (or heartening) effect that heterosexuality itself could no longer be absolutely guaranteed " (442). This "subtextual" strategy, wherein coded desire is readable only to viewers properly qualified to decrypt it, is typically condemned (by all but slash fans) as coy, mercenary, and apolitical at best. Joyrich's mobilization of Sedgwick's framework, however, leads her to caution that "in formulating a politics of representation, we need not -- indeed, should not -- simply ask for more... the explicit revelation of sexuality on commercial television need not explode the logic of the closet" (467). In fact, the appearance of explicit "gay characters" on TV programs can serve to localize and thus contain what are otherwise more pervasive and destabilizing homoerotic undercurrents, implying that, enmeshed as we are in the inexorable seesaw of binaries, "subtext" or "connotation" is in some ways the more progressive mode.
According to Joyrich, this strategy is a key permutation of "the [TV] industry's attempts to define sexuality as product while retaining its simultaneous anxiety around sexuality as practice" (451), an economic bargain often facilitated by "encourag[ing] an epistemology (and erotics) of 'knowing viewers'" (453) (or, in my terms, trained detectives). She contends that "the logic of the commodity is already related to the logic of the closet. In other words, there is no pure space of gay self-disclosure uncontaminated by relations of consumerism and commodification, just as there is no pure space of consumerism uncontaminated by what we might see as closet relations" (462). In "The Epistemological Stakes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Amelie Hastie similarly calls attention to the "inherent overlap between consumerist and epistemological economies present both in television itself and in television criticism" (29). She notes that Buffy explicitly thematizes the search for knowledge by including research, historical information, and "watching" as characteristic plot points. By absorbing this focus, fans "are trained in epistemological viewing practices" (19), indoctrinated into "a desire for and production of knowledge" (16) and a "historical consciousness" that works against "the ephemeral nature of television itself" (2) (e.g. its "liveness" or present tense, an effect of ongoing episodic series; its resistance to archivability). Show tie-ins (whether in the form of commercial merchandise or fan productions), then, capitalize on viewership's coupling of desire and pleasure with the project of investigation to promote a realm of supplementary texts that drive and are driven by TV as a consumerist medium. At the same time, "This production of a knowing fan and an investment in knowledge -- by both the series and its ancillary texts -- naturally links Buffy to the work of the critic" (24). If, in the consumer logics of television itself, the desire to watch is linked with the desire to know, than it's also true that "Television criticism depends upon consumption" and its pleasures (25) -- another of the open secrets that the closet both exposes and conceals. In other words, Hastie's analysis dovetails with my own by theorizing the practices of screen, fan, and academic detectives as congruent and interdependent, shaped by corresponding investments in epistemology and consumption as interlocking modes of engagement. Each is enabled and constrained by closet formations wherein binary terms continually reassert their authority in spite of their manifest instability and contradictions.
Lynne Joyrich's article "Epistemology of the Console" offers a comprehensive model of how epistemology and consumption are fundamentally intertwined with sexuality in the televisual economy. Her premise is that "U.S. television both impedes and constructs, exposes and buries, a particular knowledge of sexuality" (440) as one of its structuring projects, to the point that "the closet becomes an implicit TV form" (450). The incessant swinging of the closet door (445) is an effect of the ways television relies on homosexuality as "the sexuality produced precisely as obstacle, necessarily inside and outside the televisual domain... [its] disclosure seemingly compulsory yet forbidden, demanded yet contained" (449). Like most scholars of queer representation and reception, Joyrich observes that the media have managed homosexual desire through deliberate ambiguity, with contradictory consequences: "Held 'definitionally in suspense' through connotation, homosexuality became impossible either to confirm or to disprove, with the unsettling (or heartening) effect that heterosexuality itself could no longer be absolutely guaranteed " (442). This "subtextual" strategy, wherein coded desire is readable only to viewers properly qualified to decrypt it, is typically condemned (by all but slash fans) as coy, mercenary, and apolitical at best. Joyrich's mobilization of Sedgwick's framework, however, leads her to caution that "in formulating a politics of representation, we need not -- indeed, should not -- simply ask for more... the explicit revelation of sexuality on commercial television need not explode the logic of the closet" (467). In fact, the appearance of explicit "gay characters" on TV programs can serve to localize and thus contain what are otherwise more pervasive and destabilizing homoerotic undercurrents, implying that, enmeshed as we are in the inexorable seesaw of binaries, "subtext" or "connotation" is in some ways the more progressive mode.
According to Joyrich, this strategy is a key permutation of "the [TV] industry's attempts to define sexuality as product while retaining its simultaneous anxiety around sexuality as practice" (451), an economic bargain often facilitated by "encourag[ing] an epistemology (and erotics) of 'knowing viewers'" (453) (or, in my terms, trained detectives). She contends that "the logic of the commodity is already related to the logic of the closet. In other words, there is no pure space of gay self-disclosure uncontaminated by relations of consumerism and commodification, just as there is no pure space of consumerism uncontaminated by what we might see as closet relations" (462). In "The Epistemological Stakes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer," Amelie Hastie similarly calls attention to the "inherent overlap between consumerist and epistemological economies present both in television itself and in television criticism" (29). She notes that Buffy explicitly thematizes the search for knowledge by including research, historical information, and "watching" as characteristic plot points. By absorbing this focus, fans "are trained in epistemological viewing practices" (19), indoctrinated into "a desire for and production of knowledge" (16) and a "historical consciousness" that works against "the ephemeral nature of television itself" (2) (e.g. its "liveness" or present tense, an effect of ongoing episodic series; its resistance to archivability). Show tie-ins (whether in the form of commercial merchandise or fan productions), then, capitalize on viewership's coupling of desire and pleasure with the project of investigation to promote a realm of supplementary texts that drive and are driven by TV as a consumerist medium. At the same time, "This production of a knowing fan and an investment in knowledge -- by both the series and its ancillary texts -- naturally links Buffy to the work of the critic" (24). If, in the consumer logics of television itself, the desire to watch is linked with the desire to know, than it's also true that "Television criticism depends upon consumption" and its pleasures (25) -- another of the open secrets that the closet both exposes and conceals. In other words, Hastie's analysis dovetails with my own by theorizing the practices of screen, fan, and academic detectives as congruent and interdependent, shaped by corresponding investments in epistemology and consumption as interlocking modes of engagement. Each is enabled and constrained by closet formations wherein binary terms continually reassert their authority in spite of their manifest instability and contradictions.
