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.