Seeing Blackness in Prison: Understanding Prison Diversity on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black
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Description
On July 11, 2013, Netflix premiered its fifth original series, Orange Is the New Black, a fictionalized comedic drama based on the memoir by Piper Kerman of the same name. The show follows Piper Chapman, a young, white upper-middle-class woman, after she is sentenced to fifteen months in prison for transporting money for her drug-dealing ex-girlfriend nearly ten years earlier. Orange Is the New Black was met with both popular and critical acclaim, and to date has been renewed for its fourth season. The show has made the lives of incarcerated women visible in an unprecedented way. At the time of this writing, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. The number of women in prison increased by 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, while the rate of women’s incarceration was almost one and a half times that of men’s. So perhaps it should not be surprising that one of the most critically acclaimed shows about women in recent years takes place in a federal women’s prison. Orange Is the New Black is breaking new representational ground with its diverse, female-led cast and scenes illustrating some of the harsh realities of prison life. In a televisual era where the driving economic logic is that diversity sells, these groundbreaking representations are not quite as revolutionary as they may initially seem. Although Orange is representing some of the most vulnerable women in the country, its comedic tone and narrative themes are simultaneously perpetuating some of the most persistent cultural myths about criminality and prison in order to do so. Focusing on the themes of blackness and visibility, I critically examine the continuities between the show’s subject matter (the mass incarceration of women), its political economy (as a Netflix original series), and its critical reception. The show’s creators were able to mitigate the risks of content creation, in part, by strategic appeals to diversity. The risks taken at the textual level actually work to temper the risks of Netflix’s early forays into content creation. The success of Orange Is the New Black proves a point made by Herman Gray and other media scholars: the recognition of difference within contemporary media is good business practice. It is one strategy, of many, used to create marketable representations and manage the riskiness of participating in an ever-less regulated sphere of capitalism. Orange Is the New Black is situated at the intersection of the prison and entertainment industries, and by interrogating the logic animating both industries, we can discern a coherency of affective investments across seemingly disparate spheres.
Source Publication
The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century
Source Editors/Authors
Kevin McDonald, Daniel Smith-Rowsey
Publication Date
2016
Recommended Citation
Farr, Brittany, "Seeing Blackness in Prison: Understanding Prison Diversity on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black" (2016). Faculty Chapters. 484.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/484
