Let me give a more specific example of the kind of text/audience, inside/outside ambivalence I’m interrogating here, from Doty’s third chapter “I Love Laverne and Shirley: Lesbian Narratives, Queer Pleasures, and Television Sitcoms” — an ambivalence that, in this case, bleeds into an uncertainty about how in fact to define lesbian. Doty relies on Adrienne Rich’s concept of a “lesbian continuum” that (in her words) “embrace[s] many more forms of primary intensity between and among women,” “not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman” (42). Under this rubric, “The fundamentally lesbian foundations of narrative construction in these shows don’t mean that the major characters need necessarily be read as subtextual or closeted lesbians” (42), although “they also allow for, and even encourage, readings of most of the women characters as ‘really’ lesbian for viewers” (43). In other words, it is only by magically evacuating sex and sexual desire from the concept of lesbianism that Doty is able to overcome is his squeamishness about claiming such programs as lesbian texts, and it is only in the interpretations of the audience that the characters are then reclaimed as “really” lesbian. The hinge shackling the dubious representability of lesbian desire to the erratic oscillation of the text/audience hierarchy is evident, here.
Doty’s analysis, I think, is haunted by an imperative that is ultimately unrealizable: the mandate to maintain the integrity of the boundaries between inside and outside, text and audience, gay and straight, even as he embarks on the project of questioning those boundaries. He defines “queerness” oppositionally as “a quality related to any expression that can be marked as contra-, non-, or anti-straight,” even as he “use[s] it to question the cultural demarcations between the queer and the straight” (xv). The contradictions of this queerness are mirrored in his convoluted attempts to locate it either inside or outside of mass culture texts — driven by the utopian notion that there might someday be an as-yet-undiscovered way for queerness to unambiguously become visible in these media. In the end, Doty amply demonstrates his sense of “how difficult it can be to attribute the queerness of mass culture to just one source or another” (xiii). For my part, I peddle no panacea to resolve these difficulties which, as I understand them, are inescapable as well as extremely productive. I can claim that Olivia’s lesbianism is “in” Law & Order: SVU (as I will do shortly) only to the degree that I (and you, my readers) are willing to abandon absolute oppositions in favor of a model where the inside and the outside interpenetrate, where the borders of the television text are permeable, compromised by intertextual relations and infiltrated by audience readings, and where the presence of lesbian desire does not preclude other identifications and erotics.
