II/2/. Law and Order SVUs Sex Detectives

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 mandysbitch)

Just as closet formations often intersect, via the economic underpinnings of public and private spheres, with work, gendered ideologies of work often collide with our perception of sexuality. Fans are working women not only in "real life" careers, but in the passionate, queer work of creativity and criticism; if the latter is sometimes hidden from the former behind the slash closet door, this is in part because the very question of what is recognizable as work is intertwined with hierarchies of power. Working women onscreen have in turn been an object of interest for queer and female fans, perhaps since the early days of Mary Tyler Moore's "workplace family" and Cagney & Lacey's police partnership. In her analysis of "feminist sitcoms" across several decades (here, Murphy Brown in the 1990s), Lauren Rabinovitz includes a discussion of how Murphy Brown's "assertiveness, independence, brassiness, and 'smart mouth,' as well as her tailored and even sometimes androgynous wardrobe, may suggest her capacity as a lesbian or figure for lesbian identification while references to her active, ongoing heterosexual life and desire undercut such signifiers" (160). The ambivalence of connotation is in full force here, and I'd like to point out that, ten years later, lesbian-oriented fans describe Olivia, and the oscillation between the eruption and erasure of queer desire surrounding her on SVU, in strikingly similar terms. As Angie B. observes in her article at AfterEllen.com, Olivia has had brushes with past or potential boyfriends onscreen, but these fleeting references to heterosexuality seem far outweighed by the pervasive fact that she is:

one of the few characters on TV to exhibit what are often considered to be dyke characteristics -- with short hair, a leather jacket, and a gun at her hip, Olivia sits with legs apart, commanding the space around her. She is the protector of the victims who come through her department, a strong woman in a profession filled with men, and often physically or verbally dominates "perps." Her uniform includes t-shirts, sweaters, slacks and sensible shoes -- no heels, no frills, and little jewelry except for what appears to be a man's watch.

Notably, these qualities (like Murphy's) have, in and of themselves, nothing to do with sex between women. What they do imply is these characters' contravention of the bounds of properly feminine aesthetics and activities, the challenge to stable taxonomies of gender that inheres in their role as successful professionals. Though they may appear superficial and stereotypical, such historically contoured markers for encoding transgression in style and accessories are a crucial dimension of lesbian viewing strategies.


Alongside Olivia's place in a genealogy of television's working women, it is significant that her character is located within a distinct textual milieu: the crime procedural -- a form that Fiske describes as "the primary masculine television genre," and one of TV's favored workplaces. Since, as Fiske puts it, "'most masculine texts' eliminate 'the most significant cultural producers of the masculine identity -- women, work, and marriage'" (Cuklanz 18-19), it follows that the portrayal of women and private, "feminine" concerns like romance is especially conflicted here. Lisa Cuklanz identifies an economically-motivated shift in the textual orientation of detective shows, writing that "In the 1980s the genre became more and more similar to the soap opera, with the aim of attracting a broad-based, mixed-gender audience... the form and content of crime dramas became increasingly feminized" (24) -- but such hybridization may exacerbate rather than alleviate the tensions plaguing this televisual version of separate spheres. As Louisa Stein theorizes, genre mixing is a ubiquitous media strategy, and offers frustrations as well as opportunities to both producers and fans. In the case of SVU, the uneasy amalgamation of Olivia as police heroine and Olivia as romantic heroine, of public justice and intimate "sex crimes," invites deviant desire to erupt in the interstices of deviant genre. In its orthodox capacity as a procedural, SVU trains viewers in detective work, provoking them to turn these hermeneutic pleasures back against the clues the show itself generates to its own perverse secrets. In this section, I examine the ways that SVU's closet logics stimulate interpretive modalities that structure the interface between text and audience as a site of perpetual "outing," thwarting easy distinctions between visible and hidden, true and fictional, outside and inside sexual knowledges.