by Julie Levin Russo
term paper for MC150 Television, Gender, and Sexuality
with Professor Lynne Joyrich
Brown University
Spend a little time online with the fans of TV's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and you're likely to notice that they're engaged in a sexual investigation of their own: the case of whether main character Detective Olivia Benson is a lesbian. The terms of this inquest are echoed in the academic discipline of television studies, which explores whether the TV show itself, the audience's interpretations of it, or the social context that circumscribes both is the privileged ground of televisual meaning. This paper argues that the concurrent sleuthing of scholars, viewers, and TV characters is not only analogous but intertwined in convoluted networks that link knowledge, desire, and spectatorship across these various registers. Within this topology, the question of whether Olivia is 'really' a lesbian is inextricable from broader ambivalences that saturate the perilous associations between texts and audiences, academics and fans, investigation and eroticism, gender and consumption, television and the real world.
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acknowledgements
This paper owes a great debt to the enthusiasm (or at least accommodation) that Professor Joyrich and the other students in the class showed for my Olivia obsession, which gave my addled flash of inspiration purchase to grow into the monstrosity you see before you. My profoundest thanks, though, go to Jonna, who so generously shared her girlfriend Olivia with me. And to Clyde, who accepted sharing me with Olivia lo these many months with virtually saintly patience.