rape is “a crime ideally suited to television” (quoted in Cuklanz 16)
I am transposing Olivia into a genealogy of feminist sitcoms featuring professional women, but it is equally significant that her character is located within a distinct textual milieu: the cop/detective program — a form that Fiske describes as “the primary masculine television genre” (Cuklanz 18). Since, as Fiske puts it, “’most masculine texts’ eliminate ‘the most significant cultural producers of the masculine identity — women, work, and marriage’” (Cuklanz 19), it follows that the portrayal of women and private (i.e. feminine) concerns like romance is especially conflicted here. Lisa Cuklanz identifies an economically-motivated shift in the textual orientation of detective shows, writing that “In the 1980s the genre became more and more similar to the soap opera, with the aim of attracting a broad-based, mixed-gender audience... the form and content of crime dramas became increasingly feminized” (24) — but such hybridization may exacerbate rather than alleviate the tensions plaguing this televisual version of separate spheres.
In her book Rape on Prime Time, Cuklanz provides the interesting statistic that, several high-profile sitcom episodes aside, crime shows accounted for approximately 87% of rape-themed narratives on prime time TV between 1976 and 1990 (out of about100 — that’s if you include L.A. Law’s 9) (23). In “Epistemology of the Console,” Joyrich also suggests (less empirically) that there may be a privileged affinity between detective programs and deviant erotics. She argues that a common mode of representing homosexuality on television is via “a logic of detection and discovery — in which hints of sexuality are offered as clues to be traced,” which is particularly evident in “the hermeneutic of suspicion found in several cop/detective shows that are characterized by their direct enactment of the drive to know” (452). In her words, “the very narrative of the detective program incites a desire to solve its enigmas, be these criminal or sexual — or frequently... a conflation of both” (453). Thus, the imminence of investigating sex and the project of knowledge more broadly is operating here at full capacity.
I’d like to propose, therefore, that the epistemological engagement with sexual deviance and violence, at its most extreme in TV’s abundant crime plots thematizing rape, is connected to the more diffuse boundary transgressions I discussed above as constitutive of the detective genre (and of television itself). In an article on rape in the media, Sarah Projansky notes that “rape narratives historically often linked rape to women’s independence” (97), and that a typical device was “a woman [who] faces rape because of her desire to access her equal right to a masculine career” (102). That is, the same figure — the empowered professional woman — tends to be, on television, both the fulcrum of lesbian anxieties and the target of sexual violence. Depictions of rape (sexual violence) and homosexual desire (sexual deviance), women’s crossings between the home and the workplace, and televisual havoc with the gendered perimeters of public and private are discourses that are all intimate with each other. Moreover, Projansky claims that the “paradox of discursively increasing (and potentially eliciting pleasure in) the very thing a text is working against” (96) is active in the media’s treatments of rape, wherein a violent erotics is represented with the explicit purpose of “educating” viewers about it as a social evil, but functions simultaneously as a titillating incitement to watch. Rape as a subject of television, then, is situated at the charged nexus of sexuality, gender, knowledge, and economics, where it is often the most treacherous aspects of these highly contested domains that are the most valuable commodities. I locate the second sense in which I claim that Olivia is a lesbian in the unavoidable homoerotic reverberations of the sex detective’s epistemological project and television’s social and commercial project, across the various levels of an intertextual field.
