Let me introduce you to Olivia Benson: a dedicated yet personally tormented detective who investigates sex crimes in New York City, sporting a deadly weapon, a leather jacket, and a short haircut. She's hopelessly in love with assistant district attorney Alexandra Cabot, who prosecutes her cases -- they're each others' domestic partners, occasional lovers, or secret crushes, depending on who is telling the story. That is, these individuals are fictional characters on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), and the question of whether Olivia could be Alex's (or anyone's) girlfriend is a particularly contested one across online SVU fandom: some fans are determined to claim her as gay, while others insist that she's straight. While there is clearly intense investment on both sides in definitively verifying the answer, there is at the same time significant confusion about the proper source of the necessary evidence: text, subtext, or metatext. In this chapter, I chronicle the inquests of three detectives with parallel mandates to uncover the truths of desire: the TV character, who is hot on the trail of New York City's sex offenders; the SVU fan, who watches the show vigilantly for clues to who is in Olivia's heart and in her bed; and the television scholar, who is fascinated by these epistemological conundrums, driven to investigate how we might know things about television, about audiences, and about sexuality. I maintain that the projects of these three detectives are intertwined in multivalent networks that link knowledge, desire, and spectatorship across diverse registers. Within this intertextual architecture, the question of whether Olivia is "really" a lesbian is inextricable from broader ambiguities that infuse the conflicted relations between texts and audiences, academics and fans, gender and consumption, hermeneutics and erotics.
My own romance with Olivia Benson began with a chance conversation at my local coffeeshop that catalyzed an addiction to USA's nightly SVU reruns. Because of my preexisting fluency in subtextual viewing protocols, the availability of the Olivia/Alex dyad transformed SVU, for me, into a compelling nexus of speculation, imagination, and desire. Olivia and Alex are indeed a power couple of female slash fandom, one among a scattered pantheon of classic OTPs: One True Pairing that certain media seem to invite us to recognize by portraying a profound (if not explicitly romantic) relationship between two characters (an archetype that, in the world of femslash, does not much predate Xena: Warrior Princess). My personal engagement with their saga depends on the contingencies that shape television viewership -- daily routines, a fortuitous meeting, and the topographies of social networks and lesbian subcultures (both on- and offline) -- demonstrating how interpretations of (and libidinal encounters with) SVU the program are entangled with internet fandom and with everyday life. Television criticism often leans toward one or the other side of the border separating diegetic content from audience reception, examining one territory in relative isolation. Here, I attempt to plot the intersections between screen text and fan text, taking them as mutually constitutive. This process incorporates the disintegration of a number of linked binaries, since the indeterminacy of inside/outside or gay/straight impinges on the stability of private/public, fiction/reality, fan/critic, leisure/work, and other oppositions. Crucial among them is the rapidly dissolving frontier between television and the internet, which brings the interdependence of TV producers and consumers ever more out into the open.
The subtext of my argument is the notion that television is itself in the closet about its digital tendencies, largely as a defense mechanism for preserving broadcast's profit models and margins. Like the question so often posed about Olivia -- "is she or isn't she?" -- the question "is it or isn't it TV?" has high stakes in hierarchical economies of power, and is addressed with a parallel coyness. Moreover, these taxonomic teases are interlaced as well as analogous: as slash fandom becomes increasingly visible and pervasive, under conditions of increasingly competitive and diffuse distribution and attention, its cultivation (or at least negotiation) takes on increasing importance as an industrial strategy. Convergence, in other words, is queer, in content as well as in form. In this milieu, my analysis consists not of cracking the case of Olivia Benson where the aforementioned detectives remain stymied, but rather of mapping the specifically televisual limits that circumscribe their inquiries, especially at the hazardous junctions of epistemological endeavors, erotic investments, and capitalist economics. I can offer no incontrovertible proof that Olivia is a lesbian, no stable hierarchy of meaning among text, subtext, and metatext: any evidence that might be tendered is always already ensnared in the vortex of the closet, wherein the secret truths of (homo)sexuality are simultaneously exposed and effaced in relentless fluctuations between binary poles. What I present here is the more nuanced claim that Olivia is the fulcrum of an apparatus of lesbian desire that operates at the volatile interchanges permeating these geographies, including those that constitute television as a mass medium. Given television's interpenetration with its social context, with online paratexts, with the competencies and orientations of its viewers, the desires and procedures of my three detectives (the character, the fan, and the critic) mirror and structure each other in their pursuit of a verdict. I maintain that it is ultimately in such irresolvable enigmas that the most fruitful prospects for knowledge, passion, and profit lie.
My own romance with Olivia Benson began with a chance conversation at my local coffeeshop that catalyzed an addiction to USA's nightly SVU reruns. Because of my preexisting fluency in subtextual viewing protocols, the availability of the Olivia/Alex dyad transformed SVU, for me, into a compelling nexus of speculation, imagination, and desire. Olivia and Alex are indeed a power couple of female slash fandom, one among a scattered pantheon of classic OTPs: One True Pairing that certain media seem to invite us to recognize by portraying a profound (if not explicitly romantic) relationship between two characters (an archetype that, in the world of femslash, does not much predate Xena: Warrior Princess). My personal engagement with their saga depends on the contingencies that shape television viewership -- daily routines, a fortuitous meeting, and the topographies of social networks and lesbian subcultures (both on- and offline) -- demonstrating how interpretations of (and libidinal encounters with) SVU the program are entangled with internet fandom and with everyday life. Television criticism often leans toward one or the other side of the border separating diegetic content from audience reception, examining one territory in relative isolation. Here, I attempt to plot the intersections between screen text and fan text, taking them as mutually constitutive. This process incorporates the disintegration of a number of linked binaries, since the indeterminacy of inside/outside or gay/straight impinges on the stability of private/public, fiction/reality, fan/critic, leisure/work, and other oppositions. Crucial among them is the rapidly dissolving frontier between television and the internet, which brings the interdependence of TV producers and consumers ever more out into the open.
The subtext of my argument is the notion that television is itself in the closet about its digital tendencies, largely as a defense mechanism for preserving broadcast's profit models and margins. Like the question so often posed about Olivia -- "is she or isn't she?" -- the question "is it or isn't it TV?" has high stakes in hierarchical economies of power, and is addressed with a parallel coyness. Moreover, these taxonomic teases are interlaced as well as analogous: as slash fandom becomes increasingly visible and pervasive, under conditions of increasingly competitive and diffuse distribution and attention, its cultivation (or at least negotiation) takes on increasing importance as an industrial strategy. Convergence, in other words, is queer, in content as well as in form. In this milieu, my analysis consists not of cracking the case of Olivia Benson where the aforementioned detectives remain stymied, but rather of mapping the specifically televisual limits that circumscribe their inquiries, especially at the hazardous junctions of epistemological endeavors, erotic investments, and capitalist economics. I can offer no incontrovertible proof that Olivia is a lesbian, no stable hierarchy of meaning among text, subtext, and metatext: any evidence that might be tendered is always already ensnared in the vortex of the closet, wherein the secret truths of (homo)sexuality are simultaneously exposed and effaced in relentless fluctuations between binary poles. What I present here is the more nuanced claim that Olivia is the fulcrum of an apparatus of lesbian desire that operates at the volatile interchanges permeating these geographies, including those that constitute television as a mass medium. Given television's interpenetration with its social context, with online paratexts, with the competencies and orientations of its viewers, the desires and procedures of my three detectives (the character, the fan, and the critic) mirror and structure each other in their pursuit of a verdict. I maintain that it is ultimately in such irresolvable enigmas that the most fruitful prospects for knowledge, passion, and profit lie.
