Doty’s study and mine are necessarily engaged with a broader ongoing debate in the discipline of television studies (probably its central debate) about how to theorize the interfaces between text, audience, and sociopolitical context. Over several decades of interdisciplinary ferment, these have been transformed from more or less stable and opposable categories to a more postmodern assemblage where all familiar borders seem to become porous. Textual critics, for their part, have developed a model of television itself as a quintessentially postmodern media form characterized by intertextuality, self-reflexivity, seriality, and the continual play of segmentation and flow. Theorists like Fiske have similarly wanted to “dissolve” the classification of the audience too into “a multitude of differences” that “makes nonsense of any categorical boundaries” (56). Ang summarizes the state of affairs when she writes that “in our media-saturated world, media audiences can no longer be conceived as neatly demarcated categories of people, collectively set in relation to a single set of isolated texts and messages, each carrying a finite number of subject positions” (126). The apparently infinite degree of specificity called for by the progressive disintegration of established units poses a thorny analytic challenge, and Doty inaugurates his own attempts to interrogate where one might locate queerness in this matrix by recognizing this very difficulty that has been bequeathed to him: “within cultural studies, ‘audience’ is now always already acknowledged to be fragmented, polymorphous, contradictory, and ‘nomadic,’ whether in the form of individual or group subjects. Given this, it seems an almost impossible task to conduct reception studies that capture the complexity of those moments in which audiences meet mass culture texts” (1).
This is not to suggest that no distinctions or hierarchies can be recognized across these registers. Episodes of SVU are obviously distinguishable from fan fiction stories, for example, as SVU’s producers are from fans as producers, and each are differently interfaced with apparatuses of power. Streeter and Wahl express one version of this sort of intellectual compromise: “One can grant that viewers produce oppositional readings while still acknowledging that the viewers’ power within culture is not equivalent to that of TV executives. While this unequal distribution of power over televisual culture exists, it should not be simplified or imagined as monolithic or unidirectional” (251). By the same token, not all readings are created equal, and it is important to maintain an awareness that seeing Olivia with Alex and seeing Olivia with her partner Elliot, for example, are likewise divergent positions differently inflected by power relations. The point is that debates around these questions — on the part of fans (like those in the discussion board thread above) who refer alternately to episodes, fandom, actors and industry in attempts to find evidentiary purchase, as much as on the part of academics like Doty —make it evident that such crucial boundaries stubbornly elude efforts to render them fixed and impermeable.
