Such boundary confusions are figured in fiction, but they are more than just a metaphor. The unreliability of its own perimeter was a founding condition of television: because "experts of the period [the 1950s] agreed that the modern home should blur distinctions between inside and outside spaces," as Lynne Spigel notes, "television was the ideal companion for these suburban homes" (212-213). At the same time, this ambiguity was the source of acute "anxieties," as "popular media expressed uncertainty about the distinction between real and electrical space" (219). In his essay "Television: Set and Screen," Sam Weber theorizes that, "by definition, television takes place in at least three places at once" (117): the places of production, of reception, and the "in between" place of transmission. Television's tendency to perforate and compromise the frontiers between discrete spaces, generating contradictory overlaps and simultaneities, only intensifies with media convergence. Resolution to the enigma of where diegetic authority stops and audience interpretation begins is frustrated by design, as promotional paratexts further erode the circumference of the text, interactive network websites that of the medium, and fansites that of the corporate brand.
Thus, the mystery "is she or isn't she?" is inextricable from the mystery of what television itself is: if we can't determine the latter, evidence for the former will never be stable, rendering convergence a closet brimming with speculation and creativity. Just as television technology -- the signal's perpetual transmission through the walls of the home, the scanning beam or pixels that only simulate a fixed image -- is central to the difficulty of confirming its limits, the internet platforms of television fandom are integral its border wars. In her "Brief History of Media Fandom," Francesca Coppa observes that, from the 1990s, "The movement of fandom online, as well as an increasingly customizable experience, moved slash fandom out into the mainstream" (54), making it more influential in both the production and consumption of mass media. In an initial shift from Usenet, "mailing lists customized fandom by allowing fans to select from among their fannish interests, [then] blogs such as LiveJournal.com... began to be widely adopted across fandom around 2003, where it caused a wide-scale reorganization of fandom infrastructure" (57). Law & Order: SVU, which has aired from 1999 to the present, spanned this transition, which is a factor in the varied geography of its slash following: a compendium of links to author pages, Yahoo mailing lists, LiveJournal communities, multimedia archives, and official web sites at {http://xenawp.org/svu} offers some sense of the broad scope of slash activity around Olivia (pairing her with Alex as well as other female SVU characters).
One artifact that captures the vitality of this network is Cabenson's magnum opus "The Case of the Butch and the Blonde" {http://ship-manifesto.livejournal.com/43570.html}. Written for the LiveJournal community The Shipper's Manifesto (short for "relationshipper"), which invites essays introducing the rationale for and appraisal of a couple in any fandom, this Olivia/Alex handbook provides an invaluable chronicle of the interpretive practices of lesbian-identified viewers. Cabenson's extensive acknowledgements of others' contributions of "feedback, information, and time" (as well as illustrations) reveal the collaborative labor and passion that goes into narrating Olivia and Alex's romance. The post, framed by the community's administrative architecture and with pages of feedback, displays the affordances of LiveJournal's interface, which allows for longer-form and multithreaded discussion (in comparison to a bulletin board or mailing list), relying on the username as a personal space and identity. Nonetheless, Cabenson also thanks the denizens of Television Without Pity (or TWoP, an irreverent TV clearinghouse that hosts a popular SVU forum) and elsewhere, while her manifesto is mirrored at a popular static archive {http://ralst.com/Manifestos.html} and included in the ship_manifesto community's off-LJ search engine. Thus, while sympathetic fans have evidently clustered in an intimate nexus, it is one with fluid margins, and at least in the case of SVU, the walls between LiveJournal slashers and other factions are low. Cabenson demonstrates even more meticulously the porousness between the television diegesis and online fanworks: humorously formulating a legal argument, she presents the "evidence" for Olivia and Alex's lesbian relationship as an encyclopedic catalogue of subtly homoerotic onscreen moments, collectively compiled by a squad of fan investigators and annotated with the fanonical readings that cobble them into an epic love story (complete with links to relevant fan fiction stories alongside the screencaps in the "defense exhibit"). Finally, the personal anecdote with which Cabenson opens ("All Rise for the Honorable Cabenson"), as per ship_manifesto conventions, offers a snapshot of a trajectory of fannish desire via cultural and technological cartographies: finding SVU via familiar femslash OTPs at a seminal multifandom archive, passing through search engines to concentrated Law & Order femslash and the TWoP discussions, and catching up on the show only after-the-fact with USA's reruns. Cabenson's backstory illustrates the increasingly typical pattern of experiencing a television program as subsequent and subordinate to the online interpretive community surrounding it. Her essay serves, in turn, as a central precinct for evangelizing new fans of SVU and the Olivia/Alex pairing. Such complex, protean fan formations indicate that the straight/gay closet is symbiotic with the television/internet closet, revealing that the success of the ostensibly discrete screen text owes more to its unacknowledged subtext and fan text than TPTB would perhaps care to admit.
Thus, the mystery "is she or isn't she?" is inextricable from the mystery of what television itself is: if we can't determine the latter, evidence for the former will never be stable, rendering convergence a closet brimming with speculation and creativity. Just as television technology -- the signal's perpetual transmission through the walls of the home, the scanning beam or pixels that only simulate a fixed image -- is central to the difficulty of confirming its limits, the internet platforms of television fandom are integral its border wars. In her "Brief History of Media Fandom," Francesca Coppa observes that, from the 1990s, "The movement of fandom online, as well as an increasingly customizable experience, moved slash fandom out into the mainstream" (54), making it more influential in both the production and consumption of mass media. In an initial shift from Usenet, "mailing lists customized fandom by allowing fans to select from among their fannish interests, [then] blogs such as LiveJournal.com... began to be widely adopted across fandom around 2003, where it caused a wide-scale reorganization of fandom infrastructure" (57). Law & Order: SVU, which has aired from 1999 to the present, spanned this transition, which is a factor in the varied geography of its slash following: a compendium of links to author pages, Yahoo mailing lists, LiveJournal communities, multimedia archives, and official web sites at {http://xenawp.org/svu} offers some sense of the broad scope of slash activity around Olivia (pairing her with Alex as well as other female SVU characters).
One artifact that captures the vitality of this network is Cabenson's magnum opus "The Case of the Butch and the Blonde" {http://ship-manifesto.livejournal.com/43570.html}. Written for the LiveJournal community The Shipper's Manifesto (short for "relationshipper"), which invites essays introducing the rationale for and appraisal of a couple in any fandom, this Olivia/Alex handbook provides an invaluable chronicle of the interpretive practices of lesbian-identified viewers. Cabenson's extensive acknowledgements of others' contributions of "feedback, information, and time" (as well as illustrations) reveal the collaborative labor and passion that goes into narrating Olivia and Alex's romance. The post, framed by the community's administrative architecture and with pages of feedback, displays the affordances of LiveJournal's interface, which allows for longer-form and multithreaded discussion (in comparison to a bulletin board or mailing list), relying on the username as a personal space and identity. Nonetheless, Cabenson also thanks the denizens of Television Without Pity (or TWoP, an irreverent TV clearinghouse that hosts a popular SVU forum) and elsewhere, while her manifesto is mirrored at a popular static archive {http://ralst.com/Manifestos.html} and included in the ship_manifesto community's off-LJ search engine. Thus, while sympathetic fans have evidently clustered in an intimate nexus, it is one with fluid margins, and at least in the case of SVU, the walls between LiveJournal slashers and other factions are low. Cabenson demonstrates even more meticulously the porousness between the television diegesis and online fanworks: humorously formulating a legal argument, she presents the "evidence" for Olivia and Alex's lesbian relationship as an encyclopedic catalogue of subtly homoerotic onscreen moments, collectively compiled by a squad of fan investigators and annotated with the fanonical readings that cobble them into an epic love story (complete with links to relevant fan fiction stories alongside the screencaps in the "defense exhibit"). Finally, the personal anecdote with which Cabenson opens ("All Rise for the Honorable Cabenson"), as per ship_manifesto conventions, offers a snapshot of a trajectory of fannish desire via cultural and technological cartographies: finding SVU via familiar femslash OTPs at a seminal multifandom archive, passing through search engines to concentrated Law & Order femslash and the TWoP discussions, and catching up on the show only after-the-fact with USA's reruns. Cabenson's backstory illustrates the increasingly typical pattern of experiencing a television program as subsequent and subordinate to the online interpretive community surrounding it. Her essay serves, in turn, as a central precinct for evangelizing new fans of SVU and the Olivia/Alex pairing. Such complex, protean fan formations indicate that the straight/gay closet is symbiotic with the television/internet closet, revealing that the success of the ostensibly discrete screen text owes more to its unacknowledged subtext and fan text than TPTB would perhaps care to admit.
