Postfeminism Meets the Women in Prison Genre

Abstract

This article argues that Orange Is the New Black ( OITNB) uses postfeminist strategies to covertly promote prison reform and exercise a subtle critique of (female) mass incarceration while remaining constrained by the limitations of a postfeminist sensibility. Despite its contradictory and uneven agenda, OITNB should be seen as an important ally in the process of raising awareness about media (mis)representations of female prisoners, not least because of the program’s own self-reflexive commentary on tropes of the women in prison genre. The article calls for a tactical alliance between academic examinations of female imprisonment and critical sensibilities in popular culture to further more fundamental critiques of women’s incarceration, and its concomitant cost to individuals, families, and society.

Prison foodways in "Orange is the New Black"

“…OITNB has made women's incarceration issues more visible, though even in critically-minded WIP programs, there exists a tension between the need to entertain and the desire to educate (Cecil, 2007;Demers, 2017;Schwan, 2016;Terry, 2016). Weiss (2014) argued that OITNB's most significant contribution lay in its portrayal of nonconforming gender types, yet privileges screen time and intimate scenes for bodies that meet acceptable standards of (white) feminine beauty.…”

“…For example, after a confrontation between a white character and a black character regarding white guilt, the camera focuses on the white woman's facial expression as the black character walks out of the frame. The show's producer has said many times in interviews that the white, attractive, upper-middle-class main character is a "trojan horse" to draw in a mainly white, middle-class audience; this may further stereotype women of color and/or poor women who are imprisoned (Caputi, 2015;Demers, 2017;Enck & Morrissey, 2015;Schwan, 2016).…”

Diversidad entre rejas: Estereotipos e identidad de género en la ficción televisiva Orange is the New Black

“…Es el caso de esta serie, "alejada de las representaciones vinculadas al tradicionalismo patriarcal" (Aguado & Martínez, 2015: 263) y que apuesta por visibilizar las enfermedades mentales, las mujeres transgénero, el aborto, las agresiones sexuales o la vejez. A pesar de su reciente andadura televisiva, ha motivado profusas investigaciones que parten de los estudios de género (Artt & Schwan, 2016;Fernández & Menéndez, 2016;Schwan, 2016;McKeown & Parry, 2017). De la misma manera, la discriminación racial en prisión también es un recurrente tema de estudio (Caputi, 2015;Enck & Morrisey, 2015;Aguado & Martínez, 2016;Belcher, 2016), junto a la construcción de la línea temporal de la serie (Silverman & Ryalls, 2016), las ocupaciones laborales de las protagonistas (Pramaggiore, 2016) o la estrategia promocional de Netflix (DeCarvalho & Cox, 2016).…”

Extended “Visiting Hours”

“… 3. Elsewhere in this issue, Schwan (2016) offers a more detailed reflection on the show’s implied audience of urban professionals. …”