After previewing selections from this paper while it was a work in progress, Sally Forth jokingly told me that she “Can't wait to get to the ‘Olivia is really gay’ part” (personal correspondence). As I come to the concluding section, my readers will doubtless realize (if I haven’t made it amply explicit already) that there is no such part. Certainly, to some degree I myself wish, like any similarly invested fan (or any detective), that I could irrefutably prove my allegation. My intellectual enterprise in this paper, however, has been to establish that any evidence that might be tendered toward such a hypothetically unassailable outcome is always already ensnared in the swirling vortex of the closet, wherein the secret truths of (homo)sexuality are simultaneously exposed and effaced in relentless eddies, inseparable as they are from the spirals of knowledge and pleasure constitutive of television as a mass cultural commodity. Thus I am caught, too, between fannish zeal and scholarly rigor, between (at the risk of waxing heavy-handed with my metaphors) my impractically proximate desk and television. I maintain, though, that it is ultimately in such irresolvable tensions, in the incessant intertextual transmutations among divergent terms and registers, that the most fruitful prospects for knowledge, pleasure (and of course, profit) lie.
If, in one sense, this paper is a colossal tease for those who may seek purchase to confirm, once and for all, that Olivia is a lesbian, in another, this ardent critical endeavor has been the supreme erotic encounter between Olivia (my fellow detective) and I, in defiance of the frontier dividing the real world from the one on the (TV or computer) screen — and what could be more substantial proof that Olivia swings my way than that? To clarify, I don’t mean to fall back on the position that Olivia is finally most gay in viewers’ readings of her as such, but rather to locate the reality of televisual lesbianism in the ceaseless churning between audiences and texts, public and private, masculine and feminine, fact and fantasy (and the rest). As a node in the diffuse online network of Olivia fandom, this paper too has permeable borders, and is promiscuously open to new interfaces and to continual expansion and reconfiguration. The epistemological and erotic connections it will or won’t cultivate with fans, with academics, with the whole encompassing machine of televisual interpretation, only now begin to be generated.
~ END ~
[ aftermath ("next" link below is BROKEN) ]
another personal anecdote
Mocking me, my little brother gestures at the television and says, talking very slowly, "Look Julie. Inside the box. Outside the box." Needless to say, I don't see it that way :)