In her foregoing exploration of television’s closet logics, Joyrich observes that “the institutional organization of U.S. broadcasting situates television precisely on the precarious border of public and private, ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Here it constructs knowledges identified as both secret (domestically received) and shared (defined as part of a collective national culture)” (445). In other words, television’s textual contortions around homosexuality are not only akin to those of the culture at large (in Sedgwick’s terms), but also interlaced with them — and related binary hazards. The premise of my argument about Law & Order: SVU is that, in order to fully appreciate the mobilization of lesbian desire in this text, we must recognize that television (like lesbianism) is intermingled with a perilous context of diverse crises and anxieties. If, as I discussed above, television is known for destabilizing familiar boundaries, this is in part because it came of age (and has continued to develop) as the primary mass medium while the surrounding culture was in a process of profound transformation.
In an article about television as “The Suburban Home Companion” in the 1950’s, Lynn Spigel maintains that, during an era when the frontiers of (the domestic) inside and (the economic) outside were being renegotiated, “Television was caught in a contradictory movement between private and public worlds, and it often became a rhetorical figure for that contradiction” (213) — the home’s “antiseptic” “window on the world” but also a breach in its walls that lets social contagions in. Such ambivalence had gendered ramifications, as television “became a central trope for the crisis of masculinity in post-war culture” (229). Though “this fear of feminization has characterized the debates on mass culture since the nineteenth century” (229-30), of particular concern in this case was the fantasy that “television’s blurring of private and public space became a powerful tool in the hands of housewives who could use the technology to invert the sexist hierarchies at the heart of the separation of spheres” (231). The fact that this nightmare included “ways for women to control their husbands’ sexual desires through television” (231) highlights the element of erotic deviance in these transgressions.
The volatile public/private nexus is at the heart of television’s economic deployment as much as of its discursive features. “The contemporary practices of domesticity, of the ‘home,’” Streeter and Wahl write, “are an integral part of the constitution of television” (244) — and, indeed, vice versa. Crucially, these mutual influences especially intersect with contested gender relations — in ways that are not entirely new:
The idea of the living room as the center of leisure in the modern TV household is part of a broader gendered discursive practice: the discourse of the ‘consumer’... As others have observed, the industry’s view of consumers is both analogous and historically linked to Western patriarchy’s view of women. Assumptions about domestic space, and its function within a capitalist economy, are built on the gendered roles of married couples (249)
That is, the ideological and economic stability of consumer capitalism, from its inception, depended upon the segregation of public and private domains that were also always constructed as masculine and feminine, but Streeter and Wahl hold that this divide was never coherent: “in spite of all the efforts to the contrary, women became involved in the market because of the simple necessity of purchasing goods to maintain a household... This hidden economic influence hints at the fallacy of the ‘separate spheres’ theory, of the idea of a private space disengaged from the marketplace” (250-1). Bathrick traces this paradox toward the birth of television, affirming that “Above all, [the 19th century True Woman] was to preserve her home as a refuge from the marketplace, while at the same time she would grow increasingly dependent on that marketplace for its goods and services... By the 1950s the arrival of television insured an almost complete ‘occupation’ of the private by the public” (100). So, an already rich ambivalence about the literal and symbolic role of women in the economy, particularly in relation to the consumption of mass culture, took on new intensities when television entered the picture.
