Feminist Perspectives on Orange Is the New Black: Thirteen Critical Essays by April Kalogeropoulos Householder & Adrienne Trier-Bieniek

Author:April Kalogeropoulos Householder & Adrienne Trier-Bieniek [Householder, April Kalogeropoulos]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Homonormativity in OITNB

These two genres share an investment in tight homosocial communities. While some scholars have critiqued The L-Word for its focus on friendships exclusively between lesbians and bisexuals (Lee and Meyer 2007, 235) for others, the depiction of a distinct lesbian community was not only part of its representational value, but facilitated the building of community around it and similar series (Peters 2011, 201; Pratt 2007, 139–140). Both genres allow for a deeper engagement with the challenges of women and the bonds, both platonic and sexual, that they share because of closed homo-social communities, whether chosen and structurally enforced.

This homo-sociality of these series become an important bridge to what Didi Herman (2003) identifies as the homonormative potential of the women-in-prison series. Herman argues that Bad Girls is a homonormative text, similar to series like Queer as Folk in its construction of “lesbian and gay sexuality” as “both unremarkable and, potentially, desirable” (143) and notes five primary ways “in which BG’s lesbian lens is highlighted: “diversity of representation, sexual agency, the portrayal of an erotically-charged love story with a happy ending, an insider commonsense, and the representation of family” (148). Problematically, Herman ignores or dismisses some of Bad Girls limitations in this respect, in particular the extent to which lesbian relationships are largely sexless either by circumstance (Nikki’s girlfriend is a prison official) or in practice (another pair, Denny and Shaz, are never shown having sex). Wentworth has similar problems, intensified by the fact that the most significant lesbian character in the the series is depicted as violent and manipulative. While imperfectly enacted in Bad Girls, the concept of homonormativity is significant to understanding the way in which a text’s structures and thematics can explore lesbian relationships as central and normalized. Homonormativity can also be applied as a salient concept for understanding the lesbian family program, where lesbian characters take primacy and have both sexual and romantic agency.

OITNB builds on the potential observed in Bad Girls for a homonormative text, embracing not only the possibility of lesbian relationships and supportive homosocial relationships, but placing them as the driving source of the series. At the most surface level, OITNB is marked as a homonormative text at its outset as viewers are invited to enter the world of Litchfield through the character of Piper. At first blush Piper appears to be the archetypal sweet, vulnerable, heterosexual girl who was implicated in a crime not of her own design (Ciasullo 2008, 197) but quickly it becomes clear that Piper is neither sweet or heterosexual, a point driven home in the first episode by the depiction in flashback of sex with her girlfriend at the time, Alex (1.1). While we (literally) enter the prison through heterosexual characters who are, or become, mothers in Wentworth and Bad Girls, we are explicitly offered a bisexual character as our first point of identification in OITNB. Furthermore, the first sex scene of the series that is depicted as satisfying is a same-sex one. Piper previously initiates sex in

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