With the procedural as their milieu, the epistemological and sexual violence of such gendered, genre'd interchanges comes to the fore. 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 about 100 -- 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... incites a desire to solve its enigmas, be these criminal or sexual -- or frequently... a conflation of both" (452-453). These unavoidable homoerotic reverberations of the sex detective's epistemological project and television's commercial project, across the various levels of an intertextual orbit, illuminate the persistent equivalence of queer and criminal sexuality in mass media representations.
I'd like to propose, therefore, that the procedural genre's investment in producing knowledge of perversion, at its most violent in TV's abundant crime plots thematizing rape, is connected to the more diffuse boundary transgressions I discussed above as constitutive 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.
The imminence of investigating sex and the project of knowledge more broadly is operating here at full capacity, but our various detectives can nonetheless come to divergent conclusions about SVU's erotic enigmas. While the procedural's formal constraints dictate that each of the program's diegetic mysteries is more or less solved by the end of the episode, sexual hermeneutics at large never reaches such closure. Sedgwick offers one approach to the turbulent complexity that permanently defers the resolution of closet-inflected questions like that of Olivia's orientation 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 induce these desires to be searched out and seen. Given, also, the multiple subject positions that 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.
I'd like to propose, therefore, that the procedural genre's investment in producing knowledge of perversion, at its most violent in TV's abundant crime plots thematizing rape, is connected to the more diffuse boundary transgressions I discussed above as constitutive 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.
The imminence of investigating sex and the project of knowledge more broadly is operating here at full capacity, but our various detectives can nonetheless come to divergent conclusions about SVU's erotic enigmas. While the procedural's formal constraints dictate that each of the program's diegetic mysteries is more or less solved by the end of the episode, sexual hermeneutics at large never reaches such closure. Sedgwick offers one approach to the turbulent complexity that permanently defers the resolution of closet-inflected questions like that of Olivia's orientation 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 induce these desires to be searched out and seen. Given, also, the multiple subject positions that 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.
