After previewing selections from the original version of this chapter 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 [email], 26 June 2004). Needless to say, there is no such part: my analysis has not solved any of the enigmas of the closet, whether on the axis straight/gay, TV/internet, or its other intertwined polarities. The price to be paid for such complexity is a refusal of the sort of politics of representation that Sally Forth rousingly renders:
My traitorous restraint in refusing this opportunity to return a verdict in their favor does little to settle the critic/fan conundrum, either. As my own rejoinder to those who insist on enforcing Olivia's heterosexuality, my work here is conceived as engaging rather than merely commenting on this expansive and interactive battleground. Posted online since mid-2004 as a node in the diffuse matrix of Olivia fandom, this article too has permeable boundaries, and is open to wanton intersections and to continual reconfiguration. Thus if, in one sense, I've created a colossal tease for those who may wish to prove conclusively that Olivia is a lesbian, in another, this ardent critique 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 evidence that Olivia swings my way than that? Nonetheless, it remains unclear how Olivia can be my girlfriend within an academic project, or how such a project can satisfy fandom's desires. Part of the puzzle is differentiating serious work from salacious leisure, a margin that late capitalism renders ever more coy. The explicit incorporation of fan labor into the media industry undermines the distinction between professional and amateur production, which debunks the fantasy that consumers inhabit an entirely separate sphere from producers. Following a contrasting strategic imaginary, it can be in the promotional interest of creators to present themselves as familiar with (and to) fandom. Meanwhile, as consumer engagement is increasingly valued, the importance of desire as an interface between media commodities and their reception, as a form of productivity in itself, comes to the fore. The industrial escalation of television's identity crisis makes it imperative to consider the confluences between outside and inside, public and private, reality and fiction that lend the libidinal economies of slash and its closets their powerful vitality.
In order to be free, we must be seen... For this reason, the struggle to become visible has been part of every civil rights movement in this country. Conservatives are constantly fighting against the realistic portrayal of gays and lesbians in the media. By making us invisible, they can define us, control us, and stop us from fully participating in this culture... It is why the closet is so destructive.While this call can be deployed strategically, the threshold of hidden/visible is itself caught up in the closet's structural logic. As the case of Olivia Benson demonstrates, seeing a lesbian on television is far from a simple procedure, and what looks like a "realistic portrayal" is contingent on localized viewing strategies. Because visuality seems to promise transparency, I have elided it, here, in favor of the density of textual hermeneutics. In the epistemological labyrinth of subtext (the diegetic zone of connotation), extratext (the program's outside, so far as it is delineable), paratext (its official framing materials), metatext (its nebula of ancillary knowledge), and intertext (its promiscuous network of connections), I root some of the irrepressible fertility of the closet. If the "private eyes" of my title are watching, they do so in ways that cross the borders of both privacy and seeing, performing detective work that illuminates a tangled ecology of meaning, power, and desire. The closet is their terrain, and despite its oppressive fickleness I'd venture that it generates as well as conceals truths, opens as well as closes doors. This is perhaps little consolation, though, to the bitter fans who called for Olivia to come out, struggling with TPTB over ownership of her image.
My traitorous restraint in refusing this opportunity to return a verdict in their favor does little to settle the critic/fan conundrum, either. As my own rejoinder to those who insist on enforcing Olivia's heterosexuality, my work here is conceived as engaging rather than merely commenting on this expansive and interactive battleground. Posted online since mid-2004 as a node in the diffuse matrix of Olivia fandom, this article too has permeable boundaries, and is open to wanton intersections and to continual reconfiguration. Thus if, in one sense, I've created a colossal tease for those who may wish to prove conclusively that Olivia is a lesbian, in another, this ardent critique 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 evidence that Olivia swings my way than that? Nonetheless, it remains unclear how Olivia can be my girlfriend within an academic project, or how such a project can satisfy fandom's desires. Part of the puzzle is differentiating serious work from salacious leisure, a margin that late capitalism renders ever more coy. The explicit incorporation of fan labor into the media industry undermines the distinction between professional and amateur production, which debunks the fantasy that consumers inhabit an entirely separate sphere from producers. Following a contrasting strategic imaginary, it can be in the promotional interest of creators to present themselves as familiar with (and to) fandom. Meanwhile, as consumer engagement is increasingly valued, the importance of desire as an interface between media commodities and their reception, as a form of productivity in itself, comes to the fore. The industrial escalation of television's identity crisis makes it imperative to consider the confluences between outside and inside, public and private, reality and fiction that lend the libidinal economies of slash and its closets their powerful vitality.
