MARISKA: A week ago, I'm walking down Seventh Ave. [...] and all of a sudden this guy yells, [...] "Damn! I thought you were a lesbian!"
CONAN: Really? Because of your character [Olivia Benson] on the show?
MARISKA: Yes, everyone thinks that, and I don't know why.(Mariska Hargitay on Late Night with Conan O'Brien [April 2003], transcribed/quoted by Angie B. at AfterEllen.com)
"Held Within the Beat of Your Heart" is only one node in a vast matrix of textual production, and while I have selected it as an exemplar, all SVU slash to some degree engages the circulation of sexuality across variable strata. In an influential early essay, Henry Jenkins demonstrates the tangled intersections between three hermeneutic levels in a reading of early debates about Kirk/Spock slash that revolved around it's "plausibility." In contention here is the proper equilibrium at the inside/outside nexus: how much responsibility fan writers have to "textual fidelity" from within versus how much leeway they have to "transform" the "primary text" from without (a dispute rendered in fan jargon as "canon" versus "fanon"). Fought on a muddy middle ground where "all fan writing necessarily involves an appropriation of series characters and a reworking of program concepts" (467), this sparring over whether to privilege onscreen or offscreen knowledge, or how even to draw the border between the two, will never yield an undisputed victor. Ultimately, Jenkins concludes that "The reason some fans reject K/S fiction has, in the end, less to do with the stated reason that it violates established characterization than with unstated beliefs about the nature of human sexuality that determine what types of character conduct can be viewed as plausible" (468). In other words, a verdict in Olivia's case could only be provisionally negotiated among three epistemologically incommensurate but inseparable layers: screen texts, fan texts, and the social context that mediates between them.
However, Jenkins's study skirts the question of what elements of the text itself open up (or close down) queer interpretive spaces, taking Star Trek's explicit portrayal of Kirk and Spock as devoted yet platonic companions as given. Sara Gwenllian Jones critiques this tendency in "The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters," pointing out that "In such formulations, slash is interpreted as 'resistant' or 'subversive' because it seems deliberately to ignore or overrule clear textual messages indicating characters' heterosexuality" (81). As such, these analyses are trapped, like the disdainful reactions to slash fiction that Jenkins evaluates, in the homophobia of "a wider cultural logic [that] dictates that heterosexuality can be assumed while homosexuality must be proved" (81). Jones asserts, rather, that slash is "an actualization of latent textual elements" (82). In another article on Xena: Warrior Princess, she elaborates on the theory that connotative clues, or "heteroglossic cultural references which are easily read one way by queer viewers and quite differently by heterosexuals unfamiliar with the queer lexicon" (19), are a deliberate component of the TV industry's market strategy. This perspective relies on a more nuanced understanding of television as a textual form (she is specifically describing "cult television series," but I'd maintain that similar conditions are characteristic of TV in general): "There is always a deficit between what is (or can be) shown and what the avid audience wants to see, explore, develop and know... It is this deficit between what is presented on screen and what is implied or omitted that cult television formats exploit in order to enthrall viewers" (13). In other words, the diverse pleasures fans glean from imaginatively filling in what their favorite shows formally and strategically leave out is a crucial element of marketability. In this sense, Olivia's chronically boyfriend- and girlfriend-less condition is an impetus of SVU's popularity, as it stimulates much of the speculation and argumentation that swirls around her.
The dynamism of these colliding registers is also apparent in the aforementioned article about Olivia at AfterEllen.com, which corroborates her status as a popular lesbian icon. Angie B. observes smugly that, "While the producers might not understand why a strong androgynous female character works better without a boyfriend, we do." With these connotative tactics in mind, she is less inclined to privilege onscreen evidence: "What little we have seen of Olivia's romantic life has led us to believe she's straight, but the fact that those references are few and far between makes it easier for viewers to speculate about the character's sexuality." Instead, she reverse engineers Olivia's lesbian desire from the proof of fans' desires, to which "almost 200 stories, across at least 30 websites and mailing lists with sections devoted to the examination and expansion of the show's subtext" attest (years later, the numbers are far greater). If this many people see it, the argument goes, there must be something there to see. At the same time, this is at best an ambiguous brand of visibility, and for Angie B. too "subtext" points toward social inequalities: "It may be an indication of how far we need to go in the portrayal of lesbians and bisexual women on television that viewers get excited about a character like Benson despite no clear evidence that she's gay." The dilemma of the vitality of connotation versus the politics of denotation can never be resolved, because it is itself caught up in the closet's aporias, as the homophobic social field structures what differently positioned viewers can and can't see. As an active fan penning a journalistic account, Angie B. (and AfterEllen.com overall) thwarts the critic/fan border as well, further destabilizing authoritative knowledge. In this section, I will explore how vernacular discourses arguing the case of Olivia Benson promiscuously intersect the structuring oppositions of sexuality and television alike.
