If, as I have argued, the sexual violence that SVU investigates is linked to the discursive violence of the border wars that televisual lesbianism epitomizes, "Held” literalizes this connection. The atrocity of the circumstances that bring Olivia and Alex together seems to suggest that the barrier keeping them apart is so potent that it could only be breached by an act of unspeakable brutality. The fact that, here, Olivia and Alex’s first sexual experience together is actually an assault recodes the ideologically-charged indictment of slash as “character rape” because it is “a total violation of established characterizations” (Jenkins 466). It is relatively axiomatic in Olivia fan fiction that she and/or Alex are hindered in expressing their desire for each other by their professions or backgrounds — just as on the series any exploration of their personal lives is almost completely precluded. Following the contours of this loaded configuration, “Held” stipulates that Olivia and Alex weren’t romantically involved and never communicated their love before they were abducted. Referencing the diagetic restrictions and intensities that draw the outlines of their relationship, Lost writes that, in Olivia’s opinion, “Keeping a distance between herself and her investigators could only help Alex maintain her professional integrity,” and as a result, “In all the years they’d known one another, last night's dinner [the occasion of their kidnapping] was probably only the fourth or fifth time they’d dined together without Elliot playing the role of the unacknowledged chaperone” (pt. 1). Thus, the despotic vectors that obstruct Olivia and Alex’s desire on TV are translated into a fictional labyrinth of agonizing violation and guilt from whence our heroines, in the end, triumphantly emerge.
Giving poignancy to the women’s original enforced distance in the story is a recurring motif of each of the characters remembering watching the other. Many of these memories are, in fact, recapitulations of favorite onscreen moments from episodes of SVU: among Olivia’s, “the night she and Elliot surprised [Alex] while she was out on a date, her hair up and dressed in a stunning red cocktail dress;... arguing about a case in the hallway outside her office” (pt. 3); among Alex’s, “Olivia incongruously dressed in a shimmering black evening dress, standing next to her in front of the window looking into an interrogation room, their fingers accidentally brushing” (pt. 6). The latter passage continues, “Memories segued into fantasies: Olivia and she walking down a corridor and Olivia suddenly pushing her against the wall and claiming her mouth in a kiss, Olivia showing up late one night at her apartment and taking her from behind as she lay sprawled over the dining room table” (pt. 6). That is, observation and imagination, television and fiction, slide effortlessly into one another, often in the substance of a single event: Alex confesses, “The other night when I asked you out to dinner, I was half pretending it was a date” (pt. 3) — echoing in a more hopeful erotics the rich leveling economies correlating various planes of sexual violence.
As I have theorized SVU as a TV program (along with commentators like Sally Forth and Angie B.), the elements that conspire to render Olivia unrepresentable as a lesbian onscreen are ultimately extratextual: our culture’s pervasive homophobia; the economic imperative to appeal to a mass audience; the gendered hazards bequeathed to television by historical hierarchies and transformations; the insidious ubiquity of the closet. Fan fiction stories like “Held,” however, transpose the impediments to Olivia and Alex’s romance from outside the text to inside the characters’ psyches, reconstituting these oppressions as their individual fears and inhibitions. Even when fics thematize, as they often do, Olivia or Alex’s struggle with prejudice or internalized homophobia, these conditions are still located as hang-ups that, while they may seethe with acknowledged violence, can be processed and (usually) overcome inter/personally. Simultaneously, “Held” (and many other stories) also transpose the fans’ procedures of watching (obsessive scrutiny of the characters’ attire, vigilance for suspect looks and touches), as well as their tendency to fantasize about what they see, into the heads of the characters, converting the viewers’ competencies as sex detectives into Olivia and Alex’s erotic waltz. What appears is a kind of machine for collapsing TV’s divergent registers into each other — and it is in this interactive destabilization of the ostensibly obvious perimeters distinguishing text, audience, and metatext that lesbian desire in the televisual sense operates. Olivia can be my girlfriend, likewise, in my own libidinous interface with these perpetual flows of meaning wherein SVU episodes, industry gossip, and fan production penetrate and transform each other.
