Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
4 - Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Orange Is the New Black's showrunner Jenji Kohan has indicated that she aspires towards activism through the vehicle of entertainment. And indeed, her series centers the intersectional vulnerabilities of women prisoners, providing a much-needed cultural resource for formerly incarcerated and at-risk women. However, it also generates the unfortunate tendency to commodify their experiences. This is further complicated by Netflix's commercial practices, which tend to repackage identity positions and political commitments as taste preferences and entertainment experiences. Paired with Netflix's global ambitions and its continuing investment in the acquisition and production of prison shows, Orange Is the New Black may therefore be working at cross-purposes with its own aspirations by cultivating an increasingly transnational taste for prisons.
Keywords: Orange Is the New Black, women's imprisonment, intersectionality, queer and trans celebrity activism, Netflix streaming and recommendation, online TV fan cultures
We’re Not in OZ Anymore
As the title of Salamishah Tillet's review of Orange Is the New Black puts it: “It's so not OZ.” OZ first aired in 1997, around the time that premium cable channels like HBO were first exploring the potential of producing their own scripted original dramas. Much about TV had changed by the time Orange premiered as part of Netflix's own expedition into original programming over a decade later. Unlike OZ or The Wire, which helped to midwife the so-called “New Golden Age” of television, Orange represents one of its more recent and popular exemplars, emerging at a time when streaming upstarts such as Netflix were first becoming heavyweight contenders for market share in TV viewing.
Orange also belongs to a recognizably different historical moment than series like OZ or The Wire. Due in large part to a flurry of works published by academics and activists, including Michelle Alexander's best-selling The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration has become an increasingly urgent topic of public conversation and concern. Even so, Orange remains one of only a few scripted TV dramas which have intimately explored prison life in the contemporary moment of American mass incarceration. Even more remarkably, it chose to focus on women prisoners rather than men.
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- Chapter
- Information
- American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality TelevisionCaptivating Aspirations, pp. 167 - 222Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022