overview

Rallied by such campaigns to defend my girlfriend’s reputation, I was itching to dive into the fray. This paper is in part my own rejoinder to those within fan culture who insist on enforcing Olivia’s heterosexuality. As an analysis that begins as a romance, however, it is also engaged with a more esoteric question, that of what my libidinous TV obsession is doing in an academic paper in the first place. Negotiating the contested boundary between critic and fan, that is, sometimes seems almost as treacherous as tangling with the one between straight and gay. This paper chronicles the inquests of three detectives with parallel mandates to search out the truths of desire: my beloved Olivia, always hot on the trail of New York City’s sex offenders; the SVU fan, who watches the show vigilantly for clues to who is in Olivia’s heart and in her bed; and the television scholar, who is fascinated by these epistemological conundrums, driven to investigate how we might know things about television, about audiences, and about sexuality. I maintain that the projects of these three detectives are intertwined in multivalent networks that link knowledge, desire, and spectatorship across diverse televisual registers. Within this fundamentally intertextual architecture, the question of whether Olivia is “really” a lesbian is inextricable from broader ambiguities that infuse the uneasy relationships between texts and audiences, academics and fans, gender and consumption, hermeneutics and erotics — and thus, this paper must attempt to survey in some modest sense this vast contextual ecology.

I model the topologies of these interfaces according to Eve Sedgwick’s theory of the closet. She conceptualizes this colloquialism as a function of the primordially fraught interdependence of binary terms, whose opposition is at the same time axiomatic and “irresolvably unstable” (10). An experience of being “bayoneted through and through... by the vectors of a disclosure at once compulsory and forbidden” and tyrannized by “an excruciating system of double binds” (70) is characteristic of this aporetic logic. While the heterosexual/homosexual dyad is of course the closet’s primary arena, Sedgwick’s thesis is that this binary is historically interwoven with any number of other essential couplings (I’ll include, in this inventory, several of TV studies’ constitutive problems: whether meaning is located inside or outside the TV text; whether the critic is the same as or different from the fan). My analysis consists, then, not of cracking the case where the aforementioned detectives remain stymied, but rather of an exploration of the specifically televisual valences that circumscribe their inquiries, especially at the hazardous junctions of epistemological endeavors, erotic investments, gender stratifications, and consumerist economics. Because the operation of the closet, by definition, dictates that it is ultimately impossible to halt the perturbing fluctuations between a concept and its converse, I can offer no incontrovertible evidence that Olivia is a lesbian, no stable hierarchy of meaning among text, audience, and metatext, no blueprint for the comfortable cohabitation of academic and fan. What I do attempt to present here, through assessments of some of television’s intellectual and social intertexts, is the more nuanced (but nonetheless forceful) claim that Olivia is the indelible fulcrum of a machine of lesbian desire that functions precisely at the volatile intersections permeating these geographies.

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