The show can’t conceive of the fact that the biggest hurdle for most of the women in prison with Chapman is not that they made ‘bad choices,’ but that their future choices are foreclosed by prison.
I recently published a review of the new Netflix show, Orange is the New Black, which you can read here.
Excerpt:
The problem here isn’t that women of color are shown naked. It’s that their bodies are starkly eroticized where white women’s are concealed in order to preserve their putative modesty. It’s a strange move for a show that otherwise revels in sex between women, but that’s the confusion of the show’s worldview. While Orange does relatively well with queerness and is careful to showcase racial diversity, it fails in its use of stock narratives about race and, to an even more devastating extent, class.
It’s been making the rounds, and I’m especially amused by the fact that it seems to have prompted several readers/online communities to actually do a breast-count. See what I mean by going to In These Times. Contact me if you need a pdf.