While Hastie explores the intimacies of consumption with televisual epistemology, Joyrich places it in a similarly inextricable relationship with gay media representation. She contends that “the logic of the commodity is already related to the logic of the closet. In other words, there is no pure space of gay self-disclosure uncontaminated by relations of consumerism and commodification, just as there is no pure space of consumerism uncontaminated by what we might see as closet relations” (462). If sexuality, knowledge, and TV’s texts and economics are mutually imprisoned in the same insatiable closet, I hope it is not too frivolous to suggest that there may be something of this logic too in the procedures of television studies as I outlined them above. That is, television scholars like Doty grapple with the precarious question of whether meaning is located inside or outside the text, in representation or interpretation, and even as this programmatic binary is extensively rejected in favor of more complex, interactive models, it seems effectively impossible to dispense with these terms completely. Their vacillation irresolvably haunts criticism like the swinging of the closet door, perhaps (as Sedgwick puts it, “the simple vesting of some alternative metaphor has never, either, been a true possibility” [72]). Moreover, our pleasure in television is the TV critic’s love that dare not speak its name, our version of the open secret. It is a gratification that seems peculiarly unrepresentable in spite of its obviousness: a residual academic stigma attached to the popular may keep it discreetly under wraps, or it may stubbornly continue to disappear even when acknowledged if methodological deficits make it difficult to incorporate. So, the study of television characters who are “closeted” has subtly self-reflexive resonances at the level of analysis itself.
In this paper, these parallels are not so subtle. Through this lengthy theoretical excursus, I am making the argument that — given a) television’s fundamental intertextuality, its interpenetration with its social context, with ancillary texts, with the competencies and orientations of its audience and b) the encompassing interdependence of epistemological, consumerist, and sexual discourses, perhaps particularly in the case of television — the desires and procedures of my three detectives (the character, the fan, and the critic) mirror and shape each other in their search for sexual knowledge. Each is enabled and constrained by closet formations wherein binary terms continually reassert their authority in spite of their manifest instability and contradictions. And under these unruly conditions, my personal erotic investments as the fan in this story are unavoidably interfaced with my intellectual ones as the critic, though this relation remains ensnared in the same profoundly shifting architecture. Having constructed, I hope, a framework that effectively debunks any effort to resolve “lesbian” or “text” into bounded categories in the typical sense, I’d now like to go on to argue that Olivia’s lesbianism is nevertheless textual, in ways that are premised particularly on this understanding of intertextual and epistemological operations.
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