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Copyright by Helen Logan Hicks 2016 The Thesis Committee for Helen Logan Hicks Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: Reconciling Contradictory Feminism Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the Queers Who Love It APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Xavier Livermon Kareem Khubchandani Reconciling Contradictory Feminism Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the Queers Who Love It by Helen Logan Hicks, BA Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2016 Dedication This thesis is dedicated to survivors of all kinds and the people who love them. Acknowledgements First, I would like to acknowledge the support of my partner Daniel. His willingness to move from California to Texas for my academic career, in addition to his steadfast patience and support, have been invaluable to me in the past two years. Of course, the guidance of my brilliant instructors and advisors here at the University of Texas at Austin has been tremendously compelling, if not sometimes terrifying. My thesis advisor Xavier Livermon and my second reader Kareem Khubchandani have both offered thoughtful, supportive, and surprisingly enthusiastic feedback on my work and to both of them I am forever grateful. Finally, my colleague and treasured friend Hayley Morgenstern has been a beacon of hope and support. Their work and mine have dovetailed in ways that were only viscerally anticipated. Our projects are now more obviously sisters projects and I am thrilled to continue our friendship and intellectual collaborations. These people in combination with the strange and contradictory feminisms of Mariska Hargitay and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit have guided recent years of my life. I am pleased to resolve this chapter with these people in my garde. v Abstract Reconciling Contradictory Feminism Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the Queers Who Love It Helen Logan Hicks, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2016 Supervisor: Xavier Livermon Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a locus of the production of feminist anti- rape discourse as well as messages promoting carceral justice. These contradictory ideologies are somehow reconciled by queer viewers of the show. I use interdisciplinary methods and a variety of feminist and queer theories to investigate this peculiar reconciliation. First, I analyze the narrative of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit through a queer critical lens of reading media. Then I examine the fans and the industry players of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in the context of the show’s problematic messaging. The conversation between the contradictions of the show and the populations who are fans of the show but who also suffer under the same conditions I criticize in my narrative analysis is important to the larger feminist conversations about rape culture, capitalist media enterprise, and queer and feminist self-identification and community building. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1: Reconciling Contradictory Feminism ...................................................1 Introduction: A Reconciliation in Context ......................................................1 “Spring Awakening” and the Consequences of Contradictory Feminism ......4 Trauma-Inspired Pleasures ............................................................................19 A Queer Continuum of Sexual Violence ....................................25 Queer Critical Cultural Reading .................................................28 The Joyful Hargitay Foundation .................................................29 Conclusion ....................................................................................................32 References ..............................................................................................................33 vii Chapter 1: Reconciling Contradictory Feminism INTRODUCTION: A RECONCILIATION IN CONTEXT When I was seven, and my mother forty-six, she became ill to the extent that her doctors believed it a terminal sickness. Defying those predictions, she survived. I admit, it is not immediately apparent what this has to do with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I promise this is not a sob story I am pulling out to win the eighth grade oratorical contest. During this time, roughly 1992 - 2000, my mother and I regularly watched live surgery programming on The Learning Channel. I was horrified by her choice to watch televised body trauma when she was simultaneously experiencing real trauma of the same kind. I relentlessly criticized her for intentionally exposing herself to the gore that she herself was intimately knowledgeable of on a daily basis for several years. She did not seem to get enough. She tried to explain that it made her feel better, and that it was interesting to see it happen from a different perspective, to someone else, with a different outcome. Twenty years later I was finishing my long delayed bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State University and I loved watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I assumed my attraction to the show was due in large part to the sexual trauma that I have survived. Watching made me feel better. It felt good to know Olivia Benson would be there every episode to advocate for characters I could, at least in one way, identify with. It helped me re-imagine my own narrative. As an adult queer woman I had taken up trauma survival as a guiding principal. I had difficulty reconciling my core values of anti-racism, feminism, and social justice with the hegemonic patriarchal messaging of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But I realized that watching the surgeries was cathartic for my mother, and watching sexual violence occur and then be resolved has been cathartic for me. “Healing” is an obvious term I might use here, but I do not think it is sufficient. If I opted to describe the pleasure of watching televisual trauma as “healing”, I fear I would imply that there is 1 some way to move beyond the trauma, and leave it behind forever. I think a more accurate way to describe the pleasure of watching these shows, for myself and for my mother, is to say we are able to relive, in a vague way, our personal traumas, and to continuously rewrite them. I do not dare to estimate what value this reimagining might have, but I am certainly no worse for it. While reading this document, I ask the reader to continually return to a framework of a hierarchy of grievability. This hierarchy is my elaboration of Butlerian grievability, Mbembeian necropolitics, and Foucauldian biopolitics. It establishes the routinization of the bodies which are suitable to live or die, and those which are suitable to be publicly grieved, as well as the degree to which the public is permitted to grieve them and which public is permitted to perform that grief. I am writing this to multiple audiences. Law & Order: Special Victims is an important text for multiple audiences. For those who are familiar with a critique of rape culture, I think that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is open to a critical interpretation of its problematic methods and messaging. For those viewers who do not regularly contemplate rape culture, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is at least a stepping stone towards consciousness of rape culture, as fraught as that stepping stone may be. Both sections of this document utilize very different methods of analysis and are framed in conversation with different readers. But they (the sections and the readers) still need each other for this conversation. In the first section “‘Spring Awakening’ and the Consequences of Contradictory Feminism”, I use a queer critical narrative reading of a specific episode to outline the harm a typical Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode is capable of through representations of sexually violent scenarios. This harm and these consequences, are grave. There is much to be desired from Benson’s constant degradation of certain feminine qualities in favor of others. And the very quality of law enforcement that is so easy to take for granted in the 2 show cannot be underestimated. The carceral component is intrinsic to the feminist discourse of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The episode I chose for this narrative analysis is the twenty-third episode of season fifteen, titled “Spring Awakening”. This episode features representations of appropriate motherhood and femininity, sex work, substance abuse, racialized interactions and social policing, and a particularly gory image of a woman’s corpse. It is one of the most shocking and offensive episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that I have ever seen (and I have seen most of them). This is precisely why I chose the episode for analysis. It has every quality a typical episode of the show should have (if its producer plans to keep its reputation): regulation of abject femininity through appropriate femininity/appropriate feminism, rape and murder, and racial scapegoating. The violence the show itself is capable of committing against vulnerable populations is premised on avenging those same populations. I rely heavily on the scholarship of Lisa Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti while evaluating these contradictory displays of abject femininity and acceptably feminism. Cuklanz and Moorti are two of a very small group of scholars who have performed in- depth analysis and theorizing of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and their