And no one is more excited, evidently, than the communities of fans who see Olivia in an erotic relationship with Alex or other female characters (or, of course, with themselves). These interpretive networks synthesize and rework SVU’s onscreen languages to articulate the results of their libidinal investigations. Shaping this process is a critical awareness, first of all, of the televisual constraints circumscribing the portrayal of sexuality — particularly, I’ve emphasized, at the perilous junction of women and the workplace, and in “masculine” genres. Angie B. reiterates the widespread recognition that the generic conditions of this detective series dictate that “the show deliberately does not focus on the personal lives of its characters.” This attribute incites and justifies disproportionately intensive deductive formulas: in the rubric of one group, for example, “one drink” between characters in the diagetic realm equates to a sexual liaison, once you control for the program’s acute representational restraint.
Moreover, I’d contend that many fans are also consciously engaged with the ways the more enfolding contortions of the closet manipulate the visibility of lesbian eroticism, both on- and offscreen. One fan fiction author, LostinTranslation, had this to say about the inspiration for the novelette “Held Within the Beat of Your Heart”:
SVU is a television series about crimes involving sex that rarely explores sexuality itself. Often times SVU traffics in stories involving extreme sexuality, but the underpinnings for such forms of sexual expression are rarely considered beyond a simple psychology that is often heavily moralized. Too often on SVU sexuality is understood within an uncomplicated dynamic of direct cause and effect. Of course, this is nonsense. With Held, I wanted to write a story about a sex crime and sexual expression, I also wanted to write a story in which the two topics would collide in unpleasant ways. I picked a horrific situation because I wanted to use such a thing as the most unlikely of backdrops for a love story. (personal correspondence)
In other words, Lost’s work is a response to some of the limitations, contradictions, and erasures that mark SVU’s texts, to the inescapable infusion of the show’s lexicon with normative hierarchies of power that are often rigid and binarized. Lost’s project is to deliberately and interactively formulate an alternative vocabulary that reveals the intimacies that SVU attempts to repress between opposing terms like natural and criminal sexuality, romantic and violent erotics.
While I wouldn’t claim (as I did with “Sacrifice”) that “Held” is at all typical of slash fiction about Olivia, I do believe it exhibits many of the discursive principles I consider characteristic of this genre — often in an especially prominent or drastic form. “Held” recounts the aftermath of a horrific, almost unthinkable crime: Olivia and Alex have been kidnapped, and our heroine is forced by their captors to sexually violate Alex. While this assault is both an extreme instance and a patent echo of the “sexually-based offenses” SVU presents each week, the text emphasizes that this was one case that was “kicked under the rug as soon as possible” (pt. 1). In a striking contrast (one the characters perceive as well) to SVU’s customarily zealous detective work, bloody clothes from the scene are given back to the women to be destroyed, and Tutuola “accidentally” wrecks the camera that the perps used to record their brutality (a figure for the television camera, perhaps) — these are “evidence no one wanted to process” (pt. 2). As in the series itself, it is clear that the specter of Olivia and Alex having sex exceeds the bounds of the detectives’ epistemological capabilities, and all signs that indicate this prospect must be hastily recontained.
“Held” highlights the precariousness of the boundaries of consent and perversion that SVU for the most part works to shore up. Alex’s determination to convince Olivia that she isn’t a rapist is a key element of the story’s plot; when Alex first asserts that she “wasn't raped,” Olivia bitterly counters that the hospital did a rape kit (pt. 1). By turning to “standard procedure” to classify their experience, Olivia makes manifest the inadequacy of the juridical infrastructure that provides SVU’s discursive framework. Alex, in Lost’s version, has decidedly kinky tastes that were sickeningly parodied in her non-consensual submission at the hands of the kidnappers. In the course of confessing her proclivities to Olivia, they have this conversation:
“There's one other thing, isn't there?”
Her breath leaving her body in a panic, Alex tried a joke. “No wonder the perps confess to you.”
Olivia almost missed it. She stopped from denying their conversation was an interrogation by only a split second. Instead she responded to the assumption underneath Alex's bantering.
“Alex, you're not a perp.”
“Are you sure?” (pt. 4)
That is, any hint of sexual deviance, even on the windward side of consensuality, brings the weight of the sex police’s criminalizing logics down upon them. The fact that it takes such an excruciating journey through physical and emotional violation to bring these characters to the point where they can love each other and still say “We’re not monsters” (pt. 6) calls attention to the ways the closet architecture operating in SVU and in its televisual and social context circumscribes the desires that can freely emerge — and demonstrates fans’ engagement with these mortal constraints in their own readings.
