If Orange Is the New Black, I Must Be Color Blind: Comic Framings of Post-Racism in the Prison-Industrial Complex

Abstract

The acclaimed Netflix original series, Orange Is the New Black ( OITNB) assembles a cast of characters representing a large swath of the population normally excluded from popular, mainstream television, including women of color, lower-class women, and queer/trans* women. Within the “tribal” organization of the fictitious Litchfield prison, the show's protagonist, Piper Chapman, naively struggles to understand the overt racialization of her new surroundings. Deploying a Burkean understanding of the comic frame, we argue that the first season of OITNB encourages audience identification primarily through the show's white, educated, upper-class central figure. Specifically, through Piper's animation of a comic corrective, OITNB enables poignant but limited critiques of U.S. post-racial fantasies (including myths of color blindness and racial equality) that so powerfully buttress the Prison-Industrial Complex.

Keywords:

• Orange Is the New Black
• Prison-Industrial Complex
• Post-Racial Color Blindness
• Feminist Critique
• Comic Frame
• Whiteness

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Katherine Sender and Peter Decherney, two anonymous reviewers, Jeff Bennett, Jenn Aglio, and Blake McDaniel for their generative feedback on this manuscript. Thank you, too, to Bryan Lysinger and Eric Sloss for their research support.

Notes

1. We should note that Piper Kerman has garnered increasing attention as a prison reform advocate and has used the success of her memoir and this show to elevate her critiques of the PIC to broader audiences. Kerman advocates actively to improve the living conditions for incarcerated women and to push the PIC to attend to the deleterious effects that imprisoning mothers has on families and localized communities.

2. Netflix is not evaluated by Nielsen ratings, which are only designed to measure advertising-based television.

3. We use “trans*” to “metaphorically capture” a range of identities “that fall outside traditional gender norms.” In an explicit effort to build alliances and solidarity, “trans* might help transcend the gender binary and provide more space for people who are in the middle, who move back and forth, or who don't identify with the binary at all” (Ryan, 2014).

4. As feminist scholars, we have chosen to identify all characters by their first names (rather than their last names, which are often used in the prison context) in an effort to recognize individual identities within the PIC.

5. For the sake of space, we specifically focus on the introduction of OITNB’s characters during the show's first season. We acknowledge that many of the same rhetorical framing devices carry over into OITNB’s second and third seasons. Notably, the second season spends more screen time invested in the back stories and character development of many of the women of color.

6. Conspicuously, all of OITNB’s featured prison personnel in the first season are racially white and frequently act in a manner that is both capricious and domineering, reflecting personal ambition that is stifled by limited upward mobility opportunities.