Spring 2001
Volume 27, Number 3

Given its institutional determinants, U.S. television's therapeutic discourses have been wedded to familial and consumer ideology, but, as Foucault has shown in his analysis of confessional strategies, it is precisely sexuality as an "implantation of perversion" that their deployment produces as the secret of the self.20 Homosexuality--the mark of diacritical sexual difference in our society--would thus be both an effect of and obstacle to television's confessional, familial, and consumer regime, the sexuality produced precisely as obstacle, necessarily inside and outside the televisual domain. If then, as White argues, television not only transmits but transforms our understanding of confessional and therapeutic relations, it also not only transmits but transforms our understanding of sexual relations.21 That is, U.S. television does not simply reflect an already closeted sexuality but actually helps organize sexuality as closeted, as positioned in the epistemic centrality yet fraught with an incoherency that I am attempting to map here.

See Also Jane Gaines: Feminist Heterosexuality and its Politically Incorrect Pleasures (Winter 1995) Lauren Berlant: '68, or Something (Autumn 1994) Diana Fuss: Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look (Summer 1992) David J. Baker: Ea and Knowing in Hawai'i (Spring 1997) Amy Robinson: It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest" (Summer 1994)

It is therefore not surprising that the epistemology of the closet is such a notable structure in recent television, even--or especially--in an era of more detailed articulation. With sexual disclosure seemingly compulsory yet forbidden, demanded yet contained, television constructs illicit sexualities ambivalently as both known and unknown; in the epistemology of the console, some things are apparently better not really apprehended even as this ignorance is maintained and betrayed by an attitude of smug knowingness about things supposedly beyond our need to fully comprehend. Thus, whether by making homosexuality the secret knowledge to be gleaned or difficult seriously to entertain, television typically creates a classic epistemic double bind. In other words, though narratives that explicitly deal with the closet are marked as exceptions, for reasons I've given, the closet becomes an implicit TV form--a logic governing not only the ways in which gays and lesbians are represented but also the generation of narratives and positions on and for TV even in the absence of openly gay characters (or gay characters at all). The dynamics of the closet for TV's queers must therefore be read alongside television's ambivalent construction of sexuality in general. Because it exceeds television's domesticated world, sexuality, even in its heterosexual varieties, can only appear as such--as sexuality--through assorted impasses and inversions (for instance, all those romantic reversals in television drama and humorous mismatches in television comedy). Rather than focus, then, on only one example--Ellen's manifest story of self-discovery and coming out--it is interesting to consider some of the permutations of television's ways of "knowing" sexuality, which might be schematized as in the following "case studies."

20. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978).

21. White argues that "the television apparatus modif[ies] and reconfigure[s] the very nature of therapy and confession as practices for producing social and individual identities and knowledge" (White, Tele-Advising, p. 7; see also pp. 8-9).

Lynne Joyrich is associate professor in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture (1996).