II/1/A Outside/Inside

The epistemological project of decoding sexuality onscreen is thus unavoidably complicit in the coy convolutions it tries to arrest. Both academics and fans have sought out the "queer character" as an object of knowledge through the same self-perpetuating ciphers that seem to propel her ever further from reach. At issue is what register of evidence for Olivia and her ilk's orientation is ultimately definitive:

• the television text, which offers proof in the form of mysteriously cathected scenes with Alexandra Cabot, short hair and butch accessories;
• the legitimacy of audience interpretations, viewing practices and communities that resoundingly proclaim Olivia's lesbian desirability;
• the extratextual milieu: the conscious intentions of the show's producers for the character and the economic necessity of keeping her palatable to a broad audience, the (perhaps excessively) open heterosexuality of actor Mariska Hargitay, homophobia and the dearth of "real" lesbians in the mass media.

Alexander Doty's book Making Things Perfectly Queer takes up the project of theorizing where we can place homosexual desire within media texts themselves (setting aside, for the moment, the study of exterior tactics of queer audiences). In this respect, it is exemplary, but equally exemplary of how criticism cannot fully escape the closet's double binds. The way that "the concept of connotation allows straight culture to use queerness for pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting to it" (xi) (the same strategy that Joyrich references above) is a central preoccupation of his analysis, but he raises more questions than he answers about the status of this queerness. On one hand, connotatively queer conventions can be understood as empowering for viewers and destabilizing for heteronormativity, and even tropes like sudden onscreen boyfriends may function as overdetermined markers of the places where lesbian desire most threatens to erupt. On the other hand, though, such open formations are "performing certain homophobic cultural work as they construct and encourage pleasures that seek to have fundamentally lesbian narratives and enjoyments pass as straight or as 'just friends' homosocial" (44). Television simultaneously encourages us to see queer desires everywhere and authorizes us to see them nowhere, and this tension between optimistic and pessimistic outlooks on polysemic texts is symptomatic of what is ultimately an ambivalence on Doty's part about whether mass culture is "perfectly queer" after all -- one that mimics the coquettish "closet of connotation" (xii) that he himself critiques.

At times, he states unequivocally that gay desire is "inside" mass media, writing that "Queer readings... result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along" (16), and denigrating "straight culture['s]... readings of texts" as "desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture" (xii). Only sentences before this declaration in his introduction, however, he preemptively backtracks, writing that "unless the text is about queers, it seems to me the queerness of most mass culture texts is less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered property than the result of acts of production or reception" (xi), and "As long as the analysis of mass culture remains dependent primarily upon texts... the queerness of and in mass culture will remain 'essentially unsubstantial,' as it will remain in the twilight zone of connotation" (xii) -- in other words, it is in the interpretive practices of the audience that the real queerness is located. "I realize that at a number of points in this book I use language suggesting that the queerness I am discussing is incontrovertibly in the text" (xi), he confesses, but eventually lets us in on the fact that this is a strategic little white lie in service of a political cause: "If mass culture remains by, for, and about straight culture, it will be so through our silences, or by our continued acquiescence to such cultural paradigms as connotation, subcultures, subcultural studies, subtexting, the closet, and other heterosexist ploys positioning straightness as the norm" (104). Doty’s analysis, driven by this utopian notion that there might someday be an as-yet-undiscovered way for queerness to unambiguously become visible in the text, is thus infiltrated by an unrealizable imperative: the mandate to reinscribe the boundaries between inside and outside, text and audience, gay and straight to pave the way for future representations, even as he embarks on the project of problematizing those boundaries.

Doty's study and mine are necessarily engaged with a broader ongoing debate in the discipline of television studies about how to theorize the interfaces between text, audience, and sociopolitical context. Over several decades of interdisciplinary ferment, these have been transformed from more or less stable and opposable categories to a more postmodern assemblage where all familiar borders seem to become porous. Textual critics, for their part, have developed a model of television itself as a quintessentially postmodern media form characterized by intertextuality, self-reflexivity, seriality, and the continual play of segmentation and flow. Audience theorists like Fiske have similarly wanted to "dissolve" the classification of the audience too into "a multitude of differences" that "makes nonsense of any categorical boundaries" (56). Ang summarizes the state of affairs when she writes that "in our media-saturated world, media audiences can no longer be conceived as neatly demarcated categories of people, collectively set in relation to a single set of isolated texts and messages, each carrying a finite number of subject positions" (126). This distributed and localized matrix undergirds Doty's opening acknowledgement of "how difficult it can be to attribute the queerness of mass culture to just one source or another" (xiii). What we can draw from this ultimately unresolved enigma, I argue, is an appreciation of the interdependence of queer interpretive work and specific codes and conventions of screen representation.

By all accounts, then, we arrive (willingly or no) at an epistemological diagram of sexuality where inside and outside interpenetrate, where the borders of the television text are porous, compromised by intertextual relations and infiltrated by audience readings, and where the presence of desire is polymorphous. This is not to suggest that no distinctions or hierarchies can be recognized across these registers. Episodes of SVU are obviously distinguishable from fan fiction stories, for example, as SVU's producers are from fans as producers, and each are differently interfaced with apparatuses of power. By the same token, not all readings are created equal, and it is important to maintain an awareness that seeing Olivia with Alex and seeing Olivia with her partner Elliot, for example, are likewise divergent positions differently inflected by power relations. The point is that discourses of sexual knowledge -- on the part of fans who refer alternately to episodes, fanworks, actors and industry in attempts to find evidentiary purchase, as much as on the part of academics like Doty -- make it apparent that crucial televisual boundaries stubbornly elude efforts to render them fixed and impermeable.

II/1/B Public/Private

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. If television compromises familiar boundaries, this is in part because it has its roots as a mass medium in destabilizing postwar transformations. 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 in social contagions. Such ambivalence had gendered ramifications, as television "became a central trope for the crisis of masculinity in post-war culture" (229). The volatile public/private nexus is at the heart of television's gendered economic deployment as much as of its discursive features. Streeter and Wahl write that "The idea of the living room as the center of leisure in the modern TV household is part of a broader... discourse of the 'consumer'... Assumptions about domestic space, and its function within a capitalist economy, are built on the gendered roles of married couples" (249). That is, the stability of consumer capitalism, from its inception, depended upon the segregation of public and private domains that were constructed as masculine and feminine, but by a wholly ideological fiction: "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). Thus though, as Spigel reminds us, a "fear of feminization has characterized the debates on mass culture since the nineteenth century" (229-30), this already rich ambivalence about the literal and symbolic role of women in the economy (particularly in relation to consumption) took on new intensities when television entered the picture.

As Serafina Bathrick writes, "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. While television is thoroughly entangled with the gendered contradictions and transgressions that span public and private spaces, the overdetermined figure of the working woman is necessarily imbricated with the televisual terrain. The professional woman, in literal terms, crossed onto the TV screen with the popular Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970 (when the reorganization of the workforce had already been underway for more than two decades, as Bathrick points out). This and other initial portrayals were predictably ambivalent, manifesting "the historical and ideological mandate for keeping the familial intact" (105) via "another, albeit more 'responsive', commitment to family values" (103) displaced onto the "workplace family." 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 "asserts that working women portrayed on TV are never granted private lives and that mothers are denied any relationship to the workplace" (102), and we would be hard pressed to demonstrate that the representational landscape has changed much since. Kirsten Lentz argues that, additionally, typical discourses around these programs translated feminist struggles against such double binds into "television’s struggle for legitimation" (50), a move that "relies simultaneously upon freeing television from its femininity and conferring new value on that femininity" (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 "Network programming executives initially became interested in 'feminist programming' in the early 1970s because it was good business," given "an important national shift in audience" (145) toward the young female professional as the new privileged consumer. In this metatextual sense, too, television's position vis à vis women's roles is inextricable from the complex interdependence of consumer capitalism and gender.

Inhabiting the borderlands of several critical oppositions, then, these negotiations inevitably intersect with erotic peril and discipline (as Sedgwick suggests they must). The fantasmatic association of lesbian deviance with female autonomy predates post-war economies and media, and 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. Because Sedgwick's theory of the closet exposes how 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, lesbian desire (as both lure and threat) is integral to televisual domains.

II/1/C Critic/Fan

If sexuality, knowledge, and TV's texts and economics are mutually entrapped in the same insatiable closet, it should come as no surprise that there is something of this logic too in the procedures of television studies. That is, scholars like Doty grapple with the precarious question of whether meaning is located inside or outside the text, in representation or interpretation, and even as this programmatic binary is extensively rejected in favor of more complex, interactive models, it seems effectively impossible to dispense with these terms completely. Streeter and Wahl point out that the mutual constitution of gendered spheres and consumer economics is inseparable from analytic uncertainties about viewers: "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 industry's critics, 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). The ideologically constructed femininity of media consumption is necessarily refracted through all facets of the project of televisual representation and inquiry, and academic work is certainly no exception.

The gratifications of TV viewing seem peculiarly unrepresentable in professional scholarship, a casualty of the devaluation of mass culture which is intimately tied to its ostensibly feminine appeal, and of methodological deficits that yoke public discourse (versus private enjoyment) to notions like rationality and objectivity. Charlotte Brunsdon's assessment is that, when it comes to "the characters who are specific to feminist television criticism: the feminist television critic and the female viewer... and the drama of their identity and difference" (114), "It is almost as if the researcher must prove herself not too competent within the sphere of popular culture to retain credibility within the sphere of analysis" (119). Our pleasure in television is the TV critic's love that dare not speak its name, our version of the open secret., which we allude to discreetly or allow to recede again as soon as it is acknowledged. So, the investigation of television characters who are "closeted" has subtly self-reflexive resonances at the level of analysis itself. Television studies has tentatively ventured further into the borderlands between critic and fan (along with so many others) than most other academic disciplines, a function of the way television itself continually puts this boundary transgression forward. In Joyrich's experience, "what had started off as two separate proceedings -- on the one hand, an intellectual concern with critical and cultural theory, and on the other, my own television viewing -- came to seem more and more intertwined. To some degree, this is symptomatic of the 'nature' of U.S. commercial television" (RR 14). If "current debates over the text and audience have made the intellectual's relationship to television a point of contention, thus demanding that critics place themselves in regard to their objects of study" (RR 14), this is all the more true of scholarship that takes the articulations between text and audience produced by fans as its object.

The fan studies community that has coalesced online has adopted the portmanteau "acafan" to name a position that merges intellectual and libidinal, professional and personal engagements with fandom. In their introduction to the watershed volume Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson acknowledge that it is "trend[s] in academic discourse... as well as the work that has gone before of well-known and well-regarded scholar-fans... [that] have permitted us to take a subject position that melds the fan and the academic" (24). In addition to this disciplinary heritage, acafan coextensivity is predicated on the formal harmonies of "fannish practice as a model for academic practice" (8), both of which, as collectively-authored "works in progress," "inhabit a fluid space that needs to be continually revised and reconsidered" (7). Their anthology has its genesis in "constant manipulation, renegotiation, commenting, and revising, all done electronically among a group of people, mostly women, intimately involved in the creation of fannish goods" (6). It is thus an artifact of what Busse, Lothian, and Reid elsewhere identify as a community of "vernacular theory" (109): the ongoing critical discourse that is ubiquitous within the particular subculture of self-aware slashers that has been the privileged object of much fan studies. While "meta" -- this tradition of informal self-reflexive analysis by and for fans -- does not originate or end with LiveJournal, it is LiveJournal's technological affordances, in particular, that allow the integration of academic and fan activities to come to fruition in the figure of the acafan. As Busse and Hellekson emphasize, "the threading, hypertextual nature of the blogosphere... replaces targeted content delivery with interpersonal interaction" (14), facilitating the decentralized interpenetration of variant identities, performances, and productions.

This is not to say, however, that this synthesis is effortless, untroubled, or immune to the swinging of the closet door, and what is recognizable as "work" and as "public" within these spheres remains gendered (it is not coincidental that Fan Fiction and Fan Community's contributors are "mostly women"). In a post on her professional (as distinguished from her locked and pseudonymous fannish) blog, Busse theorizes the "semi-public spaces" of fan interaction, where "many of us are quite comfortably hiding in plain sight," mobilizing danah boyd's term "layered public" for "an image of degrees, a continuum of public and private" (P3). The variable privacies of LiveJournal fandom, enabled by security features like friendslock, filters, and search engine blocking, are predominantly inhabited by women, and parallel the variable registers of identity and address that acafans must navigate in articulating their professional/fannish pursuits. Much of the anxiety about "privacy" here is tied to the pornographic dimension that often characterizes the fanworks at issue. In their co-written essay "'Yearning Void and Infinite Potential': Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space," Lothian, Busse, and Reid formulate a sort of "is she or isn't she?" provocation about fangirls in general, exploring the queer implications of the arousing intercourse between fans across texts. "Again and again," they report, "slash fans invoke narratives of closetedness, of coming out" (107) within an ongoing debate about if or how fannishness can be understood as an identity, perhaps even a "sexual orientation." I'd argue that the rhetoric of the so-called slash closet, wherein female fans may hide their online exploits from "real life" family, friends, and colleagues, is a meaningful symptom of the queer double binds that circumscribe women's activities as erotic producers, media consumers, and professionals (indeed, job security is often mentioned as a rationale for keeping dubious fan activities secret). Negotiating the contested boundary between critic and fan can be not only as treacherous as the one between straight and gay, public and private, or television and audience, but also insistently intertwined with them, ensnared in the same perpetually shifting closet architecture.

II/2/A Ignorance/Knowledge

With the procedural as their milieu, the epistemological and sexual violence of such gendered, genre'd interchanges comes to the fore. 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 about 100 -- 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... incites a desire to solve its enigmas, be these criminal or sexual -- or frequently... a conflation of both" (452-453). These unavoidable homoerotic reverberations of the sex detective's epistemological project and television's commercial project, across the various levels of an intertextual orbit, illuminate the persistent equivalence of queer and criminal sexuality in mass media representations.

I'd like to propose, therefore, that the procedural genre's investment in producing knowledge of perversion, at its most violent in TV's abundant crime plots thematizing rape, is connected to the more diffuse boundary transgressions I discussed above as constitutive 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.

The imminence of investigating sex and the project of knowledge more broadly is operating here at full capacity, but our various detectives can nonetheless come to divergent conclusions about SVU's erotic enigmas. While the procedural's formal constraints dictate that each of the program's diegetic mysteries is more or less solved by the end of the episode, sexual hermeneutics at large never reaches such closure. Sedgwick offers one approach to the turbulent complexity that permanently defers the resolution of closet-inflected questions like that of Olivia's orientation 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 induce these desires to be searched out and seen. Given, also, the multiple subject positions that 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.

II/2/B Innocence/Guilt

With its defining focus on "sexually-based offenses," Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is exemplary of these foundational incitements linking genre, knowledge, desire, and violence. 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 these structuring principles through a detailed discussion of a single episode. This episode, "Sacrifce" (#50/3.07), which involves a case of gay misidentification, is not classified as one of SVU's "handful of gay-related episodes" (through season 5) by Angie B. (1:P5). Lesbian themes have since been treated occasionally, but never beyond the program's framework of victimization and criminality, and too rarely to ameliorate what is perhaps a symptomatic absence: if, as I've argued, lesbian desire has an especially overdetermined relationship to TV's working women, this apparent reluctance to include it in the range of sexual sensations that SVU mediates may signal the risk already inherent in its hazardous undertow. Nor is "Sacrifce" among the episodes that make frequent appearances in fan catalogues of onscreen "subtext" between Olivia and Alex. While my example is thus idiosyncratic, I've chosen it to analyze how the logics of SVU overall set up epistemological schemas that put forward the possibility of Olivia as lesbian object and subject, 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.

Its opening tableau is 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 (SVU's constitutive coupling of transgressive desire with violence). 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 that 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 proceed from violence. Second, their reading of the victim as gay, which you'll recall is based solely on the location of the crime (as they presume 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 his gay desires. The detectives question him back at the station:

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?"

Various unmappable territories of sexuality 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 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's structuring premise, as Sedgwick conceives it). In evidence also is the potential boomerang effect of the vague "lots of people": when Olivia is the one who defends transgressive erotics (as she often is, the foil to her more conservative partner), there's always the risk that her sympathy will be viewed as an insinuation about her own sexuality. Olivia presses Wesley for the "truth" with benevolent frustration that he won't allow SVU to "help" him, demonstrating an axiom of SVU's investigative logics (and those of the culture at large): people -- and television characters -- don't 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 "Sacrifice," 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 -- and hence also with the fissures in the supposedly rock-solid reality of rape itself, the show's ostensible raison d'être (as Olivia expresses their dilemma: "without a complaining witness [the rape] doesn't exist").

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 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 moral judgments remain in force: while 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), Wesley 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 Wesley's 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 windows and 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 diegetic detective work. The new pornography angle is, of course, even more insistently self-reflexive (as are SVU's many instances of videotaped evidence). 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 existence onscreen in a sensationalistic 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 diegetic network of structuring ambiguities that reverberates intertextually and metatextually as well.

II/2/C Rape/Romance

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.

The interpretive networks of fans who see Olivia in an erotic relationship with Alex (or other female characters) 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, in "masculine" genres and at the perilous junction of women and the workplace. 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 (Baby Lurches; now offline), for example, "one drink" between characters in the diegetic 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" {http://www.ralst.com/Held1.HTM}:

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.

The endeavor of selecting an illustrative fan fiction story is even more precarious than with SVU episodes. Even within the loosely-organized agglomeration of web sites, archives, bulletin boards, and blogs that are identifiable as an SVU slash community, there is a staggering diversity of styles, interpretations, and approaches exhibited in fan works. That said, I think "Held Within the Beat of Your Heart" can be taken as typical of the classic subgenre of long stories that mobilize the conventions of lesbian romance, while also engaging slash's beloved "hurt/comfort" trope, wherein one character nurtures another through profound trauma. In a rendition tailored to SVU's signature traumas, "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 screens 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 to SVU's customarily zealous detective work (one the characters perceive as well), 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 TV 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 the latter 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 diegetic 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 (along with commentators like Sally Forth and Angie B.) have theorized SVU as a TV program, 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, a libidinous interface with the perpetual flows of meaning wherein SVU episodes, industry gossip, and fan production penetrate and transform 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.

II/3/A Television/Internet

Such boundary confusions are figured in fiction, but they are more than just a metaphor. The unreliability of its own perimeter was a founding condition of television: because "experts of the period [the 1950s] agreed that the modern home should blur distinctions between inside and outside spaces," as Lynne Spigel notes, "television was the ideal companion for these suburban homes" (212-213). At the same time, this ambiguity was the source of acute "anxieties," as "popular media expressed uncertainty about the distinction between real and electrical space" (219). In his essay "Television: Set and Screen," Sam Weber theorizes that, "by definition, television takes place in at least three places at once" (117): the places of production, of reception, and the "in between" place of transmission. Television's tendency to perforate and compromise the frontiers between discrete spaces, generating contradictory overlaps and simultaneities, only intensifies with media convergence. Resolution to the enigma of where diegetic authority stops and audience interpretation begins is frustrated by design, as promotional paratexts further erode the circumference of the text, interactive network websites that of the medium, and fansites that of the corporate brand.

Thus, the mystery "is she or isn't she?" is inextricable from the mystery of what television itself is: if we can't determine the latter, evidence for the former will never be stable, rendering convergence a closet brimming with speculation and creativity. Just as television technology -- the signal's perpetual transmission through the walls of the home, the scanning beam or pixels that only simulate a fixed image -- is central to the difficulty of confirming its limits, the internet platforms of television fandom are integral its border wars. In her "Brief History of Media Fandom," Francesca Coppa observes that, from the 1990s, "The movement of fandom online, as well as an increasingly customizable experience, moved slash fandom out into the mainstream" (54), making it more influential in both the production and consumption of mass media. In an initial shift from Usenet, "mailing lists customized fandom by allowing fans to select from among their fannish interests, [then] blogs such as LiveJournal.com... began to be widely adopted across fandom around 2003, where it caused a wide-scale reorganization of fandom infrastructure" (57). Law & Order: SVU, which has aired from 1999 to the present, spanned this transition, which is a factor in the varied geography of its slash following: a compendium of links to author pages, Yahoo mailing lists, LiveJournal communities, multimedia archives, and official web sites at {http://xenawp.org/svu} offers some sense of the broad scope of slash activity around Olivia (pairing her with Alex as well as other female SVU characters).

One artifact that captures the vitality of this network is Cabenson's magnum opus "The Case of the Butch and the Blonde" {http://ship-manifesto.livejournal.com/43570.html}. Written for the LiveJournal community The Shipper's Manifesto (short for "relationshipper"), which invites essays introducing the rationale for and appraisal of a couple in any fandom, this Olivia/Alex handbook provides an invaluable chronicle of the interpretive practices of lesbian-identified viewers. Cabenson's extensive acknowledgements of others' contributions of "feedback, information, and time" (as well as illustrations) reveal the collaborative labor and passion that goes into narrating Olivia and Alex's romance. The post, framed by the community's administrative architecture and with pages of feedback, displays the affordances of LiveJournal's interface, which allows for longer-form and multithreaded discussion (in comparison to a bulletin board or mailing list), relying on the username as a personal space and identity. Nonetheless, Cabenson also thanks the denizens of Television Without Pity (or TWoP, an irreverent TV clearinghouse that hosts a popular SVU forum) and elsewhere, while her manifesto is mirrored at a popular static archive {http://ralst.com/Manifestos.html} and included in the ship_manifesto community's off-LJ search engine. Thus, while sympathetic fans have evidently clustered in an intimate nexus, it is one with fluid margins, and at least in the case of SVU, the walls between LiveJournal slashers and other factions are low. Cabenson demonstrates even more meticulously the porousness between the television diegesis and online fanworks: humorously formulating a legal argument, she presents the "evidence" for Olivia and Alex's lesbian relationship as an encyclopedic catalogue of subtly homoerotic onscreen moments, collectively compiled by a squad of fan investigators and annotated with the fanonical readings that cobble them into an epic love story (complete with links to relevant fan fiction stories alongside the screencaps in the "defense exhibit"). Finally, the personal anecdote with which Cabenson opens ("All Rise for the Honorable Cabenson"), as per ship_manifesto conventions, offers a snapshot of a trajectory of fannish desire via cultural and technological cartographies: finding SVU via familiar femslash OTPs at a seminal multifandom archive, passing through search engines to concentrated Law & Order femslash and the TWoP discussions, and catching up on the show only after-the-fact with USA's reruns. Cabenson's backstory illustrates the increasingly typical pattern of experiencing a television program as subsequent and subordinate to the online interpretive community surrounding it. Her essay serves, in turn, as a central precinct for evangelizing new fans of SVU and the Olivia/Alex pairing. Such complex, protean fan formations indicate that the straight/gay closet is symbiotic with the television/internet closet, revealing that the success of the ostensibly discrete screen text owes more to its unacknowledged subtext and fan text than TPTB would perhaps care to admit.

II/3/B Straight/Gay

As in the instance of the Olivia/Alex Shipper's Manifesto, it is online fandom's technological substrate that capacitates particular registers in the open casefile on Olivia Benson's sexuality. Although SVU fans of various orientations display an intense investment in definitively determining the truth, there is significant confusion about where to locate legitimate evidence. The hermeneutic uncertainties of fan discourse parallel those vexing scholarly discourse (to the extent that these domains are distinct), revolving around the axes between television's inside and outside, knowledges private and public, and media producers and consumers. Given the indeterminacy of the borders of both heterosexuality and textuality, there is little hope of closing the case once and for all, but the inquests and debates can illuminate the prolific operations of the closet. While social networking interfaces tend to gather like-minded fans to discuss a loose cloud of topics, more linear message boards may invite heterogeneous fans to discuss a clearly defined topic, and as such are a platform where such debates almost inevitably erupt.

One notable thread, on the officially sponsored yet largely anarchic SVU board at USA Network's web site (the program airs on USA in syndication), can serve as an example of the vehemence and complexity of the testimonies mobilized in attepmts to prove that Olivia is gay or straight {http://web.archive.org/web/20040720081022/http://63.240.52.141/ubb/usa/html/ubb/Forum24/HTML/000155.html (the usanetwork.com forums have since undergone a redesign, and content prior to 2005 is no longer available; unfortunately the second page of this discussion is not archived)}. It begins with a cautious, open-ended query by mariskafans: "So, would anyone be too terribly offended if Olivia started dating a girl?" 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 the inherently partial picture of Olivia's desires that the screen text offers, alongside 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 tactic is then countered with references to extratextual gossip (the avowed heterosexuality of Mariska Hargitay, who portrays 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 later poster objects on political grounds, lamenting the casualties of the closet's gendered double-binds:

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, etc.] 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 particular expertise in reading television's signals. However, diegetic verification trumps these fan interpretations, providing a stable resolution to the mystery (at least if one conveniently overlooks the option of bisexuality, as noted above). When priority is given to clues located inside the television text, the implication is that, if some are arriving at the wrong verdict, their viewing strategies must be perverse or deluded. Spank puts this dismissal most succinctly: "This is ridiculous... You lot look for things that aren't there."

Far from the message board debate in both degree and kind, one fan under the pseudonym Sally Forth composed an elaborate riposte to these sorts of scornful reactions to the proposition that Olivia isn't quite straight{http://web.archive.org/web/20060423012451/http://www.sallyforth.info/}. Her exhaustive, expansive, and often excessive "rave," rendered as a rudimentary static web page, is an idiosyncratic and remarkable document of vernacular theory, detailing her observations and arguments concerning Olivia's intimacies with lesbian desire through both textual analysis and broader political critique. Covering everything from obscure inside jokes to the moral, legal, and conceptual battles over social issues like gay visibility and same-sex marriage, Sally's content and links manifest her engagement with fan and media networks even in the absence of technical interactivity. 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!'" Sally, like some of the posters quoted above, is not optimistic about the prospect of Olivia coming out within the constraints of commercial television, writing, "IMHO, TPTB 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, asserting 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 supports 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 an onscreen 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 diegetic references and absences, audience competencies and investments, industrial conditions, and political context that is not easily stabilized (and at the same time not easily dismissed). Both ephemeral online discussions and Sally's more concerted manifesto are artifacts of fans' struggle with the complexity and contradictions of the project of representing or locating lesbian desire in the televisual landscape -- its frustrations and its inexhaustibly generative potential.

II/3/C Reality/Fiction

The fluctuating topology of television's text and metatext, denotation and connotation, canon and fanon is a conceptual challenge to sexuality as an epistemological project, but it also intrudes quite concretely at the points of contact between the territories of production and consumption on either side of the screen. I have already noted television's formal and historical inclination, as a medium which endeavors to be coextensive with everyday life, to unfocus comfortable demarcations of all sorts; Jane Feuer writes that "Television as an ideological apparatus strives to break down any barriers between the fictional diegesis, the advertising diegesis, and the diegesis of the viewing family, finding it advantageous to assume all three are one and the same" (105). The commercial advantage of this blurring of fiction and reality, always manifested in the flow between programs and commercials and between programs and behind-the-scenes gossip and personalities, becomes increasingly conspicuous as the internet renders the perspectives of fans and media professionals increasingly accessible to each other. The San Francisco Chronicle infamously reported that "[SVU executive producer Neal] Baer admits tweaking fans with veiled references to Sapphic love. 'We read the fan sites. We know that people are into the Alex-Olivia thing. All the codes are in there'" (Chonin), a confession that is less interesting as an outright legitimization of "subtext" than as a junction in the ongoing course of Olivia-centric negotiations across shifting valences of textual meaning and power. The fourth wall was even more dramatically breached when, after her tremendous investment in analyzing Olivia, Sally Forth contacted portraying actress Mariska Hargitay to share her commentary: Hargitay responded directly, and allowed Sally to post a synopsis of their phone interview on her web page. Such close encounters between the organs of fan production and the organs of media production are a corollary of the industry's intensifying attention to modes and sites of fannish engagement.

Among Hargitay's "candid and sincere" answers: "She greatly appreciates all the mail she receives, including the letters from gay viewers who relate to Olivia Benson... It saddens her to think she has hurt anyone's feelings... The fact that Olivia is seen as ambiguous is interesting because her character clearly engages the viewers' imagination" (Forth #answers). Her apologia alludes to the background of the 2004 conversation: a comment Hargitay made on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in April 2003 that turned out to be a PR blunder (one that addressing the fandom via Sally Forth might rectify). During the Conan interview, Hargitay expressed what some took to be homophobic discomfort with aspersions cast on her own heterosexuality by lesbian readings of Olivia. The phenomenon to which she there reacted -- a certain slippage between Olivia's character persona and Mariska's star persona -- relies on a multifaceted intersection of real and fictional worlds:

• SVU's positioning as a drama that engages social issues "ripped from the headlines" with sensationalized realism (no doubt one reason why many rape victims contact Hargitay, which led her to include extensive sexual assault resources and information on her personal web page {http://mariska.com/resources/});
• particular parallels between Mariska's and Olivia's personal lives (until the point, not long before this appearance, when the former began publicly dating a male actor, who she later married and had a child with while continuing her role on SVU): both were single workaholics whose careers seemingly kept them too busy for a relationship;
• persistent rumors that Hargitay is herself in the closet, which are perhaps especially compelling to fans seeking "real" evidence about Olivia's orientation;
• SVU's aforementioned detective training program: if we accept the procedural's premise that the truth must be precisely what is not visible at first glance, following Olivia's trail routinely leads to probing for the real person behind her.

The Conan incident, in this broader context of actor/character intermixture, catalyzed a conspiracy theory that a fan community elaborated collectively over SVU's ensuing seasons. They hypothesized that the explanation for a pronounced transformation in Olivia's gender presentation was a systematic "de-dykefication" orchestrated by Hargitay (among the clues catalogued: the lengthening of Olivia's near-crewcut through awkward stages of dyed and hairsprayed shags, mullets, and bobs; fake tanning and other unfortunate skin treatments; plot contrivances that called for Olivia to dress up in high-femme "drag"; an overall shift to more feminine fashions; the advent of equally feminized character traits, such as baby-craziness and emotional outbursts dubbed "unpretty crying"; increasing threat of "manvils" [clumsily manufactured boyfriends or exes]; even a noticeable change in the way Olivia walks). While we cannot solve the mystery of the motives behind what amounted to an assault on the character beloved by lesbian fandom, fans' arguments for a guilty verdict are themselves evidence of a volatile collision of instabilities and inequalities around television's deployment of the subtextual closet, exacerbated in an era when its own identity is increasingly suspect.

If, in its early days, slash was sometimes condemned as "character rape," for fans of "butch" Olivia her feminization was the true violence, and their vehement expressions of rage and betrayal were commensurate with such an atrocity. In a "rant" on the subject, one LiveJournaler captures the intractable, intolerable position that results:

I really feel that the consumption of fandom has changed my opinions. Because, while reading these MH [Mariska Hargitay] articles, seeing the pictures, I get the picture of a woman who's trying to reclaim ownership of her character from the fans who see the character as gay. There is no separation between actor and character... And it pisses me off because Olivia Benson is NOT the property of Mariska Hargitay. Once those little images leave the cathode ray clutter, it becomes the property of the audience. (trancer21) {http://trancer21.livejournal.com/8081.html?format=light}

In other words, the entanglement of "actor and character" is itself inextricable from the entanglement of "cathode ray" and audience that generates interpretive concords about Olivia and Mariska's text and paratext, and these epistemological snarls are in turn ensnared in the economics of the industry. For Olivia is certainly not "the property of the audience" proportionally to her status as property within the apparatus of corporate ownership, buttressed by the legal mechanism of copyright and the system of mass distribution and financing. However, the devices of ownership are still unable to contain her in these bounds, and in keeping with the futility of binary enclosure, the siege of Olivia onscreen stimulated an efflorescence of "snark" (sarcastic criticism) online. Following the conjecture that elements of Mariska Hargitay's persona were forcibly grafted onto Olivia Benson, much of it lampooned the resulting monstrous mutant: Oliska Hargenson. As far as I can tell, this portmanteau was coined as the punch-line of the parodic fanfic "It Ain't Her" by newbie_2u {http://community.livejournal.com/ob_fangrrl/217186.html}, which features Detectives Munch and Tutuola investigating Olivia's apparent disappearance. It is an example of a smattering of "meta" stories treating this theme, and others often refigure the extratextual battle fans framed in terms of Olivia vs. Mariska as an angst-ridden erotic drama of Olivia/Mariska. One rendition reverses the familiar hierarchy, portraying Olivia as the stronger and realer double, and Mariska as the television viewer who falls prey to her charms:

She grew Olivia out, strand by re-touched strand. She tried to stop herself from disappearing, as she felt the camera draw her inside it... But she still felt herself fading. Watching Olivia, failing to see herself, falling helplessly in love with her possessor... Mariska was afraid to sleep. She was afraid that she wanted Olivia to find her. Afraid of her dreams that bled into reality. (giantessmess) {http://community.livejournal.com/ob_fangrrl/197094.html}

Here, it is Olivia who "possesses" Mariska, in both spectral and propertied senses, infiltrating "reality" with uncanny spectacle. It is not incidental that the memetic conspiracy in which these artifacts participate was largely located in a LiveJournal community: this and comparable distributed, interactive web networks haunt television like fanon Olivia haunts Mariska, perturbing the economies of corporate possession. In this context, paranoia on both sides about Mariska and Olivia commingling seems well-founded: today, TV's existence depends on its interpenetration with fan fictions.

II/4/Z End Matter

The draft of Chapter II / Private Eyes is now complete! I should add illustrations at some point, but there are none at this time.

My most recent feedback on the original essay was by email, more than a year ago, from Sam/itsnotaword/NW. I finally replied last week (what? a year is not an unreasonable turnaround time on a non-essential email in my world, srsly) and the address is dead. So I'll share the response with you here. She informed me that SVU and Xena share Liz Freidman as sometime producer -- good detective work.

I'm finishing up a dissertation chapter update of the Olivia project, and I did add some later events in the saga, including the infamous Baer quote and the speculation about Mariska. It's really interesting to hear that there might be a material (as opposed to just a stylistic) connection to Xena. Overall, I tried to highlight the potential commercial advantage of "subtext" in this version, particularly in the context of TV/internet convergence. The whole massive debate remains fascinating, but it all seems very long ago, now. I really do appreciate hearing from you about the essay, though! While I'm sure I didn't succeed in making it entirely accessible, it is very gratifying that fellow fans read it and got something out of it.

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