The epistemological project of decoding sexuality onscreen is thus unavoidably complicit in the coy convolutions it tries to arrest. Both academics and fans have sought out the "queer character" as an object of knowledge through the same self-perpetuating ciphers that seem to propel her ever further from reach. At issue is what register of evidence for Olivia and her ilk's orientation is ultimately definitive:
At times, he states unequivocally that gay desire is "inside" mass media, writing that "Queer readings... result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along" (16), and denigrating "straight culture['s]... readings of texts" as "desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture" (xii). Only sentences before this declaration in his introduction, however, he preemptively backtracks, writing that "unless the text is about queers, it seems to me the queerness of most mass culture texts is less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered property than the result of acts of production or reception" (xi), and "As long as the analysis of mass culture remains dependent primarily upon texts... the queerness of and in mass culture will remain 'essentially unsubstantial,' as it will remain in the twilight zone of connotation" (xii) -- in other words, it is in the interpretive practices of the audience that the real queerness is located. "I realize that at a number of points in this book I use language suggesting that the queerness I am discussing is incontrovertibly in the text" (xi), he confesses, but eventually lets us in on the fact that this is a strategic little white lie in service of a political cause: "If mass culture remains by, for, and about straight culture, it will be so through our silences, or by our continued acquiescence to such cultural paradigms as connotation, subcultures, subcultural studies, subtexting, the closet, and other heterosexist ploys positioning straightness as the norm" (104). Doty’s analysis, driven by this utopian notion that there might someday be an as-yet-undiscovered way for queerness to unambiguously become visible in the text, is thus infiltrated by an unrealizable imperative: the mandate to reinscribe the boundaries between inside and outside, text and audience, gay and straight to pave the way for future representations, even as he embarks on the project of problematizing those boundaries.
Doty's study and mine are necessarily engaged with a broader ongoing debate in the discipline of television studies about how to theorize the interfaces between text, audience, and sociopolitical context. Over several decades of interdisciplinary ferment, these have been transformed from more or less stable and opposable categories to a more postmodern assemblage where all familiar borders seem to become porous. Textual critics, for their part, have developed a model of television itself as a quintessentially postmodern media form characterized by intertextuality, self-reflexivity, seriality, and the continual play of segmentation and flow. Audience theorists like Fiske have similarly wanted to "dissolve" the classification of the audience too into "a multitude of differences" that "makes nonsense of any categorical boundaries" (56). Ang summarizes the state of affairs when she writes that "in our media-saturated world, media audiences can no longer be conceived as neatly demarcated categories of people, collectively set in relation to a single set of isolated texts and messages, each carrying a finite number of subject positions" (126). This distributed and localized matrix undergirds Doty's opening acknowledgement of "how difficult it can be to attribute the queerness of mass culture to just one source or another" (xiii). What we can draw from this ultimately unresolved enigma, I argue, is an appreciation of the interdependence of queer interpretive work and specific codes and conventions of screen representation.
By all accounts, then, we arrive (willingly or no) at an epistemological diagram of sexuality where inside and outside interpenetrate, where the borders of the television text are porous, compromised by intertextual relations and infiltrated by audience readings, and where the presence of desire is polymorphous. This is not to suggest that no distinctions or hierarchies can be recognized across these registers. Episodes of SVU are obviously distinguishable from fan fiction stories, for example, as SVU's producers are from fans as producers, and each are differently interfaced with apparatuses of power. By the same token, not all readings are created equal, and it is important to maintain an awareness that seeing Olivia with Alex and seeing Olivia with her partner Elliot, for example, are likewise divergent positions differently inflected by power relations. The point is that discourses of sexual knowledge -- on the part of fans who refer alternately to episodes, fanworks, actors and industry in attempts to find evidentiary purchase, as much as on the part of academics like Doty -- make it apparent that crucial televisual boundaries stubbornly elude efforts to render them fixed and impermeable.
- the television text, which offers proof in the form of mysteriously cathected scenes with Alexandra Cabot, short hair and butch accessories;
- the legitimacy of audience interpretations, viewing practices and communities that resoundingly proclaim Olivia's lesbian desirability;
- the extratextual milieu: the conscious intentions of the show's producers for the character and the economic necessity of keeping her palatable to a broad audience, the (perhaps excessively) open heterosexuality of actor Mariska Hargitay, homophobia and the dearth of "real" lesbians in the mass media.
At times, he states unequivocally that gay desire is "inside" mass media, writing that "Queer readings... result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along" (16), and denigrating "straight culture['s]... readings of texts" as "desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture" (xii). Only sentences before this declaration in his introduction, however, he preemptively backtracks, writing that "unless the text is about queers, it seems to me the queerness of most mass culture texts is less an essential, waiting-to-be-discovered property than the result of acts of production or reception" (xi), and "As long as the analysis of mass culture remains dependent primarily upon texts... the queerness of and in mass culture will remain 'essentially unsubstantial,' as it will remain in the twilight zone of connotation" (xii) -- in other words, it is in the interpretive practices of the audience that the real queerness is located. "I realize that at a number of points in this book I use language suggesting that the queerness I am discussing is incontrovertibly in the text" (xi), he confesses, but eventually lets us in on the fact that this is a strategic little white lie in service of a political cause: "If mass culture remains by, for, and about straight culture, it will be so through our silences, or by our continued acquiescence to such cultural paradigms as connotation, subcultures, subcultural studies, subtexting, the closet, and other heterosexist ploys positioning straightness as the norm" (104). Doty’s analysis, driven by this utopian notion that there might someday be an as-yet-undiscovered way for queerness to unambiguously become visible in the text, is thus infiltrated by an unrealizable imperative: the mandate to reinscribe the boundaries between inside and outside, text and audience, gay and straight to pave the way for future representations, even as he embarks on the project of problematizing those boundaries.
Doty's study and mine are necessarily engaged with a broader ongoing debate in the discipline of television studies about how to theorize the interfaces between text, audience, and sociopolitical context. Over several decades of interdisciplinary ferment, these have been transformed from more or less stable and opposable categories to a more postmodern assemblage where all familiar borders seem to become porous. Textual critics, for their part, have developed a model of television itself as a quintessentially postmodern media form characterized by intertextuality, self-reflexivity, seriality, and the continual play of segmentation and flow. Audience theorists like Fiske have similarly wanted to "dissolve" the classification of the audience too into "a multitude of differences" that "makes nonsense of any categorical boundaries" (56). Ang summarizes the state of affairs when she writes that "in our media-saturated world, media audiences can no longer be conceived as neatly demarcated categories of people, collectively set in relation to a single set of isolated texts and messages, each carrying a finite number of subject positions" (126). This distributed and localized matrix undergirds Doty's opening acknowledgement of "how difficult it can be to attribute the queerness of mass culture to just one source or another" (xiii). What we can draw from this ultimately unresolved enigma, I argue, is an appreciation of the interdependence of queer interpretive work and specific codes and conventions of screen representation.
By all accounts, then, we arrive (willingly or no) at an epistemological diagram of sexuality where inside and outside interpenetrate, where the borders of the television text are porous, compromised by intertextual relations and infiltrated by audience readings, and where the presence of desire is polymorphous. This is not to suggest that no distinctions or hierarchies can be recognized across these registers. Episodes of SVU are obviously distinguishable from fan fiction stories, for example, as SVU's producers are from fans as producers, and each are differently interfaced with apparatuses of power. By the same token, not all readings are created equal, and it is important to maintain an awareness that seeing Olivia with Alex and seeing Olivia with her partner Elliot, for example, are likewise divergent positions differently inflected by power relations. The point is that discourses of sexual knowledge -- on the part of fans who refer alternately to episodes, fanworks, actors and industry in attempts to find evidentiary purchase, as much as on the part of academics like Doty -- make it apparent that crucial televisual boundaries stubbornly elude efforts to render them fixed and impermeable.
