Inhabiting the borderlands of several critical oppositions (e.g. public/private, masculine/feminine), these negotiations inevitably intersect with erotic peril and discipline (as Sedgwick suggests they must). The phantasmatic association of lesbian deviance with female independence and liberation predates both television and the concurrent socioeconomic transformations that brought the majority of women into the workplace in the decades after WWII. In the television age, the specter of transgressive same-sex desire continues to haunt profoundly conflicted portrayals of the working woman. Sasha Torres remarks on “the televisual tendency to use feminism and lesbianism as stand-ins for each other” (177) across the industry’s various attempts to capitalize on feminism’s potential demographic appeal. She argues that this deployment performed contradictory functions, vacillating between representing the lesbian character (beginning with Marilyn McGrath on the hospital drama HeartBeat) as the “privileged signifier of feminism” and thus like other women, and as fundamentally different from other women to “ease the ideological threat... by localizing the homosexuality which might otherwise pervade these homosocial spaces” (179). In other words, the architecture of the closet reasserts itself over the figure of the feminist or professional woman as the impulse to simultaneously incorporate and displace her violation of the culture’s constitutive boundaries.
In a study of the politics of “feminist sitcoms” across several decades, Rabinovitz too claims that “women desiring women [is] the repressed aspect of female friendship throughout these programs” (151). In the case of Murphy Brown in the early 1990s, the ambivalence of connotation is again apparent as the character’s “assertiveness, independence, brassiness, and 'smart mouth,' as well as her tailored and even sometimes androgynous wardrobe, may suggest her capacity as a lesbian or figure for lesbian identification while references to her active, ongoing heterosexual life and desire undercut such signifiers” (160). I’d like to point out that this is strikingly similar to how lesbian-oriented fans describe Olivia, and the oscillation between the eruption and erasure of lesbian desire turning on her in SVU. The AfterEllen.com article observes that Olivia is
one of the few characters on TV to exhibit what are often considered to be dyke characteristics — with short hair, a leather jacket, and a gun at her hip, Olivia sits with legs apart, commanding the space around her. She is the protector of the victims who come through her department, a strong woman in a profession filled with men, and often physically or verbally dominates “perps.” Her uniform includes t-shirts, sweaters, slacks and sensible shoes — no heels, no frills, and little jewelry except for what appears to be a man’s watch.
Notably, these qualities (like Murphy’s) have, in and of themselves, nothing to do with sex between women. What they do imply is these characters’ contravention of the bounds of properly feminine aesthetics and activities, the challenge to stable hierarchies of gender that inheres in their role as successful, independent professionals. Because Sedgwick’s theory of the closet reveals that the homo/hetero frontier is inextricable from other foundational binaries, because television itself and the pleasure we take in it as consumers are deeply implicated in cultural changes that generate ever-intensifying anxieties about such divisions, the apparition of lesbian desire (both dangerous and exciting) prowls the televisual realm. This is the first sense in which I claim that Olivia’s lesbianism is indelibly “in” the television text, rooted in the most elemental interactivities constraining the representation of women on television, in a way that no amount of onscreen boyfriends could ever contain or erase.
