counter-attacks

Sally Forth has had it up to here with these sorts of vehement and scornful reactions to the suggestion that Olivia isn’t straight. Confirming that “On every SVU-related message board I've seen, the issue of Olivia's sexual preference comes up at some point,” she gripes that “Any time I posted that Olivia might be gay or bi, well, let me say, I got my ass kicked. ‘You're crazy. That scene / look / action / appearance could mean anything. Olivia Benson is not gay. Get over it!’” Her riposte is a lengthy “rave” detailing her observations and arguments concerning Olivia’s intimacies with lesbian desire through both textual analysis and broader political arguments about gay visibility in the media. Sally, like some of the posters quoted above, is not optimistic about the prospects for a girlfriend for Olivia within the economic constraints of television, writing “IMHO, TPTB [The Powers That Be] will keep Olivia as she is. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. That is the only way to avoid alienating any fans.” But she nonetheless champions the integrity of spectatorial practices, professing that “The whole point behind subtext is that people can enjoy the show however they wish, without having someone tell them that they're wrong or reading things into the show that aren't there.” Her claims are not based solely on a revaluation of fan readings, however: she backs up this call for interpretive pluralism with a humorous but meticulously impartial account of the textual “evidence” on both sides of the question “is she or isn’t she?” (making the case that those who consider the inquest over at the first glimpse of a canonical boyfriend just aren’t looking hard enough). That is, though she self-identifies as a lesbian fan, for Sally too the figure of Olivia’s lesbianism is a shifting jumble of onscreen references and absences, audience competencies and investments, TV industry strategies, and political context that is not easily brought into focus (and at the same time not easily dismissed).

A recent article about Olivia at AfterEllen.com further corroborates her burgeoning status as a lesbian icon. Author Angie B. engages the dispute in a more smug and less riled tone than Sally Forth, writing “While the producers might not understand why a strong androgynous female character works better without a boyfriend, we do.” In keeping with this knowing stance, she is less concerned with the primacy of textual evidence, theorizing that “What little we have seen of Olivia’s romantic life has led us to believe she's straight, but the fact that those references are few and far between makes it easier for viewers to speculate about the character’s sexuality.” Instead, she reverse engineers Olivia’s lesbian desire from the proof of fans’ desires, to which “almost 200 stories, across at least 30 websites and mailing lists with sections devoted to the examination and expansion of the show’s subtext” attest. If this many people see it, the argument goes, there must be something there to see. At the same time, this is at best an ambiguous brand of visibility, and for Angie B. too this points toward political inequalities: “It may be an indication of how far we need to go in the portrayal of lesbians and bisexual women on television that viewers get excited about a character like Benson despite no clear evidence that she's gay.” Across this landscape of popular debate, then, both camps struggle with the complexity and contradictions of the project of representing or locating lesbian desire in the televisual environment.