The high ceiling of my studio apartment’s main room is encircled by a wide band of crown molding, painted a deep plum to stand out against the white walls. This outline visually bounds the space where the accoutrements of sleep, work, and leisure fit together harmoniously in a necessarily economical jigsaw puzzle. More specifically, it is the border that frames the proximity of my desk and my television, which face each other across only a few feet. When term paper season rolls around, this second appliance often proves an irresistible distraction from my schoolwork, and of necessity I’ve learned to deliver myself from temptation by camping out at neighborhood coffee shops for days at a time. The background bustle of such public spaces, and the subtle sense of community surveillance, paradoxically improve my focus, but in a wandering moment I happened to catch the eye of a fellow student and fellow dyke over the lid of my powerbook. We struck up a conversation — precisely, in my interpretation, because we recognized each other as the latter — that touched on television (an easily accessible topic, perhaps, for small talk with a stranger). She mentioned her ongoing love affair with one Olivia Benson, a detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), a program I’d never paid particular attention to. After this chance encounter with a personal recommendation, however, my interest was piqued, and I wondered if I would see what my intriguing new acquaintance saw in Olivia.
The institutional apparatus of cable TV obligingly facilitated my curiosity with daily reruns of SVU on USA, and I was indulging one evening in a desultory study of the show’s potential erotics when I noticed not only Olivia, but Alexandra Cabot, the sex crime unit’s foxy assistant DA. Having extensive experience with fan culture under my belt, I knew, in an instant and unshakable epiphany, that there were fan-written romances online that paired Alex and Olivia. As the episode played on, I turned to my computer (conveniently positioned right next to my television, remember), and one quick google search later I was not disappointed. Alex and Olivia are, in fact, well on the road to becoming a power couple of girl-on-girl fan fiction. The availability of this dyad transformed the experience of SVU, for me, into a compellingly cathected site of speculation, imagination, and eros. Olivia ripened into a powerful object of desire located in the resonant interface between nightly dates with her televisual image and the alternative canon of fan productions and discussions. And this was a communicable excitement that could then ground a friendship with the mysterious stranger when I happened to run into her again a month later.
This paper is part of a story, then, that respects none of the obvious boundaries. My relationship with Olivia can’t be recounted without reference to the contingencies that shape television viewership: in this case apartment architecture, a chance meeting, and the unmapped topographies of social networks and lesbian subcultures (both on- and offline). It demonstrates and depends on the ways that interpretations of (and libidinal investments in) SVU the show are intertextually entangled with internet fandom and with the activities of everyday life. And my work here is also conceived as a participant in this diffuse and interactive landscape, rather than as a commentary on it. How else to introduce my analysis than with an account of how Olivia came to be my girlfriend, a tale that evinces a coy disregard for distinctions between the intellectual and the erotic, the academic and the fan, the real and the televisual.
Where's Alex?? I want Alex ba
Where's Alex?? I want Alex back!