After the first time [Alex] wondered whether people could tell. She had gay friends who would play “lesbian/straight?” over coffee as if there were secret signs, visible only to women in the know. And maybe there was something in that. She wondered if she exhibited such signs...
When Olivia is near she feels the whole world watching... “We should be more careful,” she says, watching the squad room for signs of interest. “We shouldn't... not where everyone can see us”... sometimes she wonders if they know already. There's not much that escapes a detective in sex crimes.
~ from “Objects in the Mirror” by CGB
Most importantly, my discussion of “Sacrifice” outlines the hermeneutic strategies that are the currency of SVU’s onscreen detectives but also of the competencies of its audience. That is, by relentlessly thematizing the investigation of desire through watching for signs, searching for clues, interrogating recalcitrant suspects, and fabricating plausible stories to fit the evidence, SVU is training its viewers to do the same. I’ve argued that the suggestion of Olivia’s lesbianism is insistently activated by the gendered logics of televisual representation overall, and their interpenetration with the precarious homo/hetero binary. And I’ve argued that SVU as a text demonstrates this topography in its narratives, which symptomatically interweave the quest for truth and justice with the search for the elusive frontier where normal sexuality and relationships cross into deviance, perversion, and violence, where private acts and desires cross into the public discourse of crime and the televisual spectacularization and commodification of sex. Additionally, I’m claiming here that SVU actively invites its viewers to scrutinize these contradictory fields of overlap for the illicit specters that haunt them — its marketability depends, after all, on the pleasure of learning the ways of sex detectives. Given a series whose premise is discovering clandestine sexual transgressions, how can we not be ever-vigilant, as an audience, for even the subtlest signs and clues. This exercise expands as fans convene their own detective squads, collectively reviewing the facts and producing explanatory narratives in their own gratifying inquests.
As the debates that inaugurated this paper amply illustrate, though, these multifarious investigations of course come to divergent conclusions about SVU’s erotic enigmas. While television’s formal configuration dictates that each of the program’s diagetic mysteries is more or less solved by the end of the episode, real-life sexual hermeneutics by nature never reaches such closure. Sedgwick offers one approach to the roiling complexity of the forces that permanently defer the resolution of closet-inflected questions like ‘is she or isn’t she’ when she observes that “Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons” (4). That is, remaining ignorant can be as vigorous a procedure as seeking knowledge, and, according to Sedgwick, “Such ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking enforcements — perhaps especially around sexuality” (her germane example is “The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape”) (5). The processes involved, then, in enabling some viewers (and, one might speculate, producers, actors, etc.) to not know of Olivia’s lesbian desires are as dynamic and robust as those arrangements that I’ve maintained induce these desires to be sought out and seen. Given, also, the multiple subject positions TV always makes available (for both formal and economic reasons) by necessarily leaving all its representations (especially of sexuality) open-ended and incomplete (to varying degrees), the fact that televisual lesbianism is selectively imperceptible is no proof that it isn’t there. This differential geography of visibility is, however, a sign of the saturation of the landscapes of text, audience, and social context with the aporetic logics of the closet, provoking unpredictable oscillations within and between strata that keep these vistas in a state of perpetual excitation.
