The high ceiling of my studio apartment’s main room is encircled by a wide band of crown molding, painted a deep plum to stand out against the white walls. This outline visually bounds the space where the accoutrements of sleep, work, and leisure fit together harmoniously in a necessarily economical jigsaw puzzle. More specifically, it is the border that frames the proximity of my desk and my television, which face each other across only a few feet. When term paper season rolls around, this second appliance often proves an irresistible distraction from my schoolwork, and of necessity I’ve learned to deliver myself from temptation by camping out at neighborhood coffee shops for days at a time. The background bustle of such public spaces, and the subtle sense of community surveillance, paradoxically improve my focus, but in a wandering moment I happened to catch the eye of a fellow student and fellow dyke over the lid of my powerbook. We struck up a conversation — precisely, in my interpretation, because we recognized each other as the latter — that touched on television (an easily accessible topic, perhaps, for small talk with a stranger). She mentioned her ongoing love affair with one Olivia Benson, a detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), a program I’d never paid particular attention to. After this chance encounter with a personal recommendation, however, my interest was piqued, and I wondered if I would see what my intriguing new acquaintance saw in Olivia.
The institutional apparatus of cable TV obligingly facilitated my curiosity with daily reruns of SVU on USA, and I was indulging one evening in a desultory study of the show’s potential erotics when I noticed not only Olivia, but Alexandra Cabot, the sex crime unit’s foxy assistant DA. Having extensive experience with fan culture under my belt, I knew, in an instant and unshakable epiphany, that there were fan-written romances online that paired Alex and Olivia. As the episode played on, I turned to my computer (conveniently positioned right next to my television, remember), and one quick google search later I was not disappointed. Alex and Olivia are, in fact, well on the road to becoming a power couple of girl-on-girl fan fiction. The availability of this dyad transformed the experience of SVU, for me, into a compellingly cathected site of speculation, imagination, and eros. Olivia ripened into a powerful object of desire located in the resonant interface between nightly dates with her televisual image and the alternative canon of fan productions and discussions. And this was a communicable excitement that could then ground a friendship with the mysterious stranger when I happened to run into her again a month later.
This paper is part of a story, then, that respects none of the obvious boundaries. My relationship with Olivia can’t be recounted without reference to the contingencies that shape television viewership: in this case apartment architecture, a chance meeting, and the unmapped topographies of social networks and lesbian subcultures (both on- and offline). It demonstrates and depends on the ways that interpretations of (and libidinal investments in) SVU the show are intertextually entangled with internet fandom and with the activities of everyday life. And my work here is also conceived as a participant in this diffuse and interactive landscape, rather than as a commentary on it. How else to introduce my analysis than with an account of how Olivia came to be my girlfriend, a tale that evinces a coy disregard for distinctions between the intellectual and the erotic, the academic and the fan, the real and the televisual.
And I haven’t yet reached the end of the tale. After I’d become intimate with Olivia by learning SVU’s languages of exposition and omission, and by absorbing the fan narratives that fill in its interstices with passion, angst, and sex, I was curious what other people thought of my new girlfriend. As it turns out, debate about Olivia’s romantic status is far more prevalent than I anticipated. One notable thread on USA’s online SVU discussion board begins with a cautious, open-ended query by mariskafans — “So, would anyone be too terribly offended if Olivia started dating a girl?” — that has thus far garnered over 50 responses (more than any other topic, though another about Olivia’s relationship with married partner Elliot Stabler is rapidly catching up). Tellingly, the question is immediately transmuted into a dispute over Olivia’s probable sexual orientation. Some fans consider only the most explicit textual citations admissible as evidence, and say so quite emphatically:
dtobe2008
She is DEFINITELY straight. There have been many episodes where she's had a date with a man and you've seen a few.teresa985
The fact that she's dated men before on the show, and no women, leads me to believe that she's straight. Unless she flat out says: “I'm dating a woman” or something of that nature, I'm not going to believe she's a lesbian.
Others respond to this literalism by pointing out both the inherently partial nature of the picture of Olivia’s love life we get from the episodes, and the possibility of a less rigidly binary sexuality:
Bekster
We don't know that she's straight — she's mentioned a significant other, what, once? She could definitely be bisexual, which would be great, she's gorgeous!Kloie
And... just because a girl's slept with men doesn't necessarily mean she's straight. lol
This strategy is then countered with references to extratextual gossip (the avowed heterosexuality of Mariska Hargitay, who plays Olivia) and TV industry logics (the imperative to appeal to a mass audience and remain within the program’s formal constraints):
svu junkie
They will never make Olivia gay 'cause her heterosexuality has already been established. If she decided to 'jump the fence' then they would have to focus on her personal life and we all know they would NEVER do this!! Heck... the show's been on 5 years and we've seen the interior of Olivia's apt. ...what...maybe once??SVUFreak107
OMG YOU GUYS ARE CRAZY!!! Mariska/Olivia is not gay no matter what it will just screw up her image in real life and no one will like her. It will take people away from teh show not to it!!!
A recent poster objects to the idea on political grounds, citing a crucial pitfall that lurks within this sort of discussion (one which this paper itself must struggle to negotiate):
SVUAddict
I find it very frustrating when females who are strong and assertive immediately get labeled lesbians. Yes, Olivia is tough and independent, but she's also straight and I've grown tired — in my own life and in Hollywood — of seeing powerful women labeled as gay. To me, at least, it undermines the potential of straight women to possess these characteristics.
Meanwhile, what is perhaps the most fascinating response overtly describes the influence of fan production on Olivia’s hypothesized sexual orientation:
Munchz Hunch
as far as olivia and being gay goes, the only reason i ever thought she WAS gay was because of all the fan fics about her BEING gay! that was what made me question her sexuality... people write fan fics from what they got off the show, and i havent seen every episode, not even CLOSE, so i was wondering after reading those fics if they [Olivia and Alex, Olivia and the new ADA Casey] truly WERE gay couples on the show. but that was put to rest after seeing her with cassidy [“Closure”] and with that reporter dude [“The Third Guy”]... so i have had my suspicions, but they were all eventually cleared up.
In this viewer’s hierarchy, fan fiction has substantial authority in the investigation of Olivia’s sexuality because it is written by those with above-average expertise in reading the television text. However, verification within the program itself trumps these fan interpretations, offering a stable resolution to the issue (at least if one conveniently overlooks the option of bisexuality, as mentioned above). We return, then, to the priority of textual data in the homo/hetero calculation, with the implication that if some are arriving at the wrong answer their viewing practices must be perverse or deluded. Spank puts this dismissal most succinctly: “This is ridiculous... You lot look for things that aren't there.”
As we see here, the question of whether Olivia could potentially be anyone’s girlfriend is a particularly contested one across the SVUniverse (online SVU fandom). While there is clearly intense investment on both sides in definitively determining the answer, there is at the same time significant confusion about how much fluidity is allowable and about the proper source of the necessary evidence (text, audience, or metatext). Given the apparent elusiveness of the boundaries of both heterosexuality and textuality, there seems to be little hope of closing the case once and for all.
Sally Forth has had it up to here with these sorts of vehement and scornful reactions to the suggestion that Olivia isn’t straight. Confirming that “On every SVU-related message board I've seen, the issue of Olivia's sexual preference comes up at some point,” she gripes that “Any time I posted that Olivia might be gay or bi, well, let me say, I got my ass kicked. ‘You're crazy. That scene / look / action / appearance could mean anything. Olivia Benson is not gay. Get over it!’” Her riposte is a lengthy “rave” detailing her observations and arguments concerning Olivia’s intimacies with lesbian desire through both textual analysis and broader political arguments about gay visibility in the media. Sally, like some of the posters quoted above, is not optimistic about the prospects for a girlfriend for Olivia within the economic constraints of television, writing “IMHO, TPTB [The Powers That Be] will keep Olivia as she is. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. That is the only way to avoid alienating any fans.” But she nonetheless champions the integrity of spectatorial practices, professing that “The whole point behind subtext is that people can enjoy the show however they wish, without having someone tell them that they're wrong or reading things into the show that aren't there.” Her claims are not based solely on a revaluation of fan readings, however: she backs up this call for interpretive pluralism with a humorous but meticulously impartial account of the textual “evidence” on both sides of the question “is she or isn’t she?” (making the case that those who consider the inquest over at the first glimpse of a canonical boyfriend just aren’t looking hard enough). That is, though she self-identifies as a lesbian fan, for Sally too the figure of Olivia’s lesbianism is a shifting jumble of onscreen references and absences, audience competencies and investments, TV industry strategies, and political context that is not easily brought into focus (and at the same time not easily dismissed).
A recent article about Olivia at AfterEllen.com further corroborates her burgeoning status as a lesbian icon. Author Angie B. engages the dispute in a more smug and less riled tone than Sally Forth, writing “While the producers might not understand why a strong androgynous female character works better without a boyfriend, we do.” In keeping with this knowing stance, she is less concerned with the primacy of textual evidence, theorizing that “What little we have seen of Olivia’s romantic life has led us to believe she's straight, but the fact that those references are few and far between makes it easier for viewers to speculate about the character’s sexuality.” Instead, she reverse engineers Olivia’s lesbian desire from the proof of fans’ desires, to which “almost 200 stories, across at least 30 websites and mailing lists with sections devoted to the examination and expansion of the show’s subtext” attest. If this many people see it, the argument goes, there must be something there to see. At the same time, this is at best an ambiguous brand of visibility, and for Angie B. too this points toward political inequalities: “It may be an indication of how far we need to go in the portrayal of lesbians and bisexual women on television that viewers get excited about a character like Benson despite no clear evidence that she's gay.” Across this landscape of popular debate, then, both camps struggle with the complexity and contradictions of the project of representing or locating lesbian desire in the televisual environment.
Rallied by such campaigns to defend my girlfriend’s reputation, I was itching to dive into the fray. This paper is in part my own rejoinder to those within fan culture who insist on enforcing Olivia’s heterosexuality. As an analysis that begins as a romance, however, it is also engaged with a more esoteric question, that of what my libidinous TV obsession is doing in an academic paper in the first place. Negotiating the contested boundary between critic and fan, that is, sometimes seems almost as treacherous as tangling with the one between straight and gay. This paper chronicles the inquests of three detectives with parallel mandates to search out the truths of desire: my beloved Olivia, always hot on the trail of New York City’s sex offenders; the SVU fan, who watches the show vigilantly for clues to who is in Olivia’s heart and in her bed; and the television scholar, who is fascinated by these epistemological conundrums, driven to investigate how we might know things about television, about audiences, and about sexuality. I maintain that the projects of these three detectives are intertwined in multivalent networks that link knowledge, desire, and spectatorship across diverse televisual registers. Within this fundamentally intertextual architecture, the question of whether Olivia is “really” a lesbian is inextricable from broader ambiguities that infuse the uneasy relationships between texts and audiences, academics and fans, gender and consumption, hermeneutics and erotics — and thus, this paper must attempt to survey in some modest sense this vast contextual ecology.
I model the topologies of these interfaces according to Eve Sedgwick’s theory of the closet. She conceptualizes this colloquialism as a function of the primordially fraught interdependence of binary terms, whose opposition is at the same time axiomatic and “irresolvably unstable” (10). 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) is characteristic of this aporetic logic. While the heterosexual/homosexual dyad is of course the closet’s primary arena, Sedgwick’s thesis is that this binary is historically interwoven with any number of other essential couplings (I’ll include, in this inventory, several of TV studies’ constitutive problems: whether meaning is located inside or outside the TV text; whether the critic is the same as or different from the fan). My analysis consists, then, not of cracking the case where the aforementioned detectives remain stymied, but rather of an exploration of the specifically televisual valences that circumscribe their inquiries, especially at the hazardous junctions of epistemological endeavors, erotic investments, gender stratifications, and consumerist economics. Because the operation of the closet, by definition, dictates that it is ultimately impossible to halt the perturbing fluctuations between a concept and its converse, I can offer no incontrovertible evidence that Olivia is a lesbian, no stable hierarchy of meaning among text, audience, and metatext, no blueprint for the comfortable cohabitation of academic and fan. What I do attempt to present here, through assessments of some of television’s intellectual and social intertexts, is the more nuanced (but nonetheless forceful) claim that Olivia is the indelible fulcrum of a machine of lesbian desire that functions precisely at the volatile intersections permeating these geographies.
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