"Home as Prison (and Prison as Home) in Feminist Work, from Stepford Wives (1975) to Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019)" (original) (raw)
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Incarceration rates within the U.S. have risen exponentially in the past fifty years, becoming the country with the highest prison population and greatly outnumbering the rest of the world. Orange is the New Black (2013- ) is an extremely popular show set in a New York women’s prison and revolves around the character of Piper Chapman who is incarcerated for a drug crime that she committed ten years earlier. Utilising multiple queer theories, applying Foucauldian discourse analysis, and analysing both the memoir and first series of the show, I will consider various portrayals of social and cultural issues that relate to imprisonment within U.S. society. Despite rising LGBT visibility within television and film, certain deviant or criminalised subjectivities that may function outside of the LGBT spectrum, but are in other ways still characterised as “queer,” are largely left unconsidered within these cultural examinations. The way that women, and their behaviour, is criminalised and punished is a distinctive consideration in sociological studies that has rarely been analysed, especially in relation to media representations. Although considerations of the connections between television and the prison, and television and queer theory, have been conducted independently, the overlap of queer theory and televisual depictions of women’s imprisonment has never been undertaken. By focusing on certain crimes, looking at the prison industrial complex itself, and analysing character’s various intersecting gender, sexual, class and race identities, I will explore the ways that the show’s fictional depiction of women in prison are able to challenge or reinforce normative understandings of imprisonment and criminality, and what underlying message(s) this can give to an audience. I will argue that, while the show is highly entertaining attracting a large fan-base, it is also able to reveal and subvert various repressive norms that function within U.S. society and criminalise multiple subjectivities.
Behaving Badly: Television's Women in Prison [Capadocia and Vis a vis/Locked Up]
Film Quarterly, 2018
This article analyzes two Spanish-language examples of the women in prison TV drama genre, Mexico's Capadocia and Spain's Vis a vis. It offers a production history of the two titles, the first made by Argos for HBO Latin America, the second by Globomedia for Antena 3, and focuses on their feminist and queer content. It also places them within the global context of the genre described in a book by TV scholar Milly Buonanno.
26. The Schizophrenic Reality of Israeli Women: A Cinematic Perspective, 2014
Handbook of Israel: Major Debates, 2016
This chapter offers a perspective on the status of Israeli women in 2014. Rather than present the standard review of women's rights in the public and private spheres, the extent of their sexual victimization and their status in politics, the workplace and academia, the chapter explores Israeli women's contemporary cinema and follows the themes and critiques raised by it. This way I introduce you, simultaneously, to Israeli women's realities, as experienced and critically portrayed by Israeli women filmmakers, as well as to women's cinema in contemporary (2014) Israel. Finally, I offer a theoretical feminist perspective on Israeli gender construction that may frame the movies' portrayal and critique of Israeli women's lives. "Women's movies" were never a significant constituent of Israel's movie industry; at least not until 2014. In the course of this year, audiences were introduced to six new Israeli feature movies written and/or directed by women, focusing on Israeli women's lives and expressing powerful feminist critique: 1 Six Acts, 2 Zero Motivation, She Is Coming Home, That Lovely Girl, Self Made and Gett: The Trial of Vivian Amsalem. Four of the six enjoyed very high public visibility as well as critical acclaim. Written in 2014, this chapter presents and discusses five of these movies, 3 offering a conceptual framework that may illuminate and enhance their social critique. 4 Any non-Israeli watching these six feminine-feminist movies would likely suppose that they reflect two distinct societies. One (depicted in That Lovely Girl, Six Acts, Zero Motivation, She Is Coming Home and Self Made) is a 21st-century liberal society, in which women enjoy formal equality and liberty and struggle with Israeli versions of gender predicaments typical of contemporary Western societies (sexual abuse; insidious employment discrimination, such as sophisticated glass ceiling; This paper was completed in November 2014. 1 According to Wikipedia, 38 movies were commercially released in Israel in 2014, 12 of them directed by women.
Ladies Love Your Box: The Rhetoric of Pleasure and Danger in Feminist Television Studies
Media/cultural studies: critical approaches, 2009
In a 2003 promotion for a new show on Comedy Central, comedian Wanda Sykes offered a characteristically pointed observation about the" reality romance" genre of television. Commenting on the wildly popular Joe Millionaire as its season finale neared, Sykes announced the show ought to be called Bitches Love Money. She cocked her head and asked," Are all the feminists in a coma?" I was watching television alone in my apartment, but I looked back and forth at the imaginary people seated to my left and right. Is she ...
Course Description: The purpose of this course is to examine the representation of women on American television through the application of feminist and media theories. The readings are complex and thought-provoking with each week focusing on a particular theme relating to women's identity as it is constructed by the media. A foundational understanding of feminism will help you, though it is not required. Television Analysis is, however, a prerequisite as a fundamental knowledge of television studies is a necessary basis for any form of television criticism. Course Objectives: • Understand and examine the following concepts/themes: feminism, post-feminism, narrative, representation of women, ideology, hegemony, consumerism, cultural studies • Become familiar with common analytic frames for the study of women's representation in the media. • Examine the relationship between television and culture while investigating gender dynamics, the family structure, heteronormativity and the role it plays in the construction of cultural identity. • Speculate on the impact of and source for popular portrayals of women on television and what they might be telling us about women's roles in society. • Contextualize images of women on television throughout American history. • It is my hope that each of you will further develop your critical thinking and critical writing skills through the various assignments and discussions throughout the course.
Prison walls are the natural landscape of radical politics as depicted in Italian cinema. The wall as “the most dreadful device of violence”, namely a device which “never evolved, since it was born perfect” (Bonvissuto), becomes a cinematic device able to provide a material connection between political and personal struggles. The prison, the house. The walls as “petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin) against which the cinema stages the failure of struggles for liberation inside society and family: the prison-house becomes in its turn a primary space of acting the struggle in the loneliness of failure. In this paper I address the cinematic construction of space within the “prison-house”, the allegorical interaction between characters and walls throughout the following examples of Italian cinema: Taviani brothers’ San Michele aveva un Gallo (1972): walls as theatrical wing, walls as audience of a private, desperate representation of politics. Dal Fra’s Antonio Gramsci – I giorni del carcere (1977): prisoners obsessively moving along endless walls, their voices, Gramsci’s voice, ghostly explaining pictures to dead hares. Home as prison (there’s no prison like home): Visconti’s Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1974), Scola’s La famiglia (1987). My aim is also to show a continuity throughout the cultural history of last four decades, drawing a parallel to other television “prisons”, from the first successful American sitcoms of the eighties, to the triumph of reality television.
Orange is the new Black, a TV-series based on Piper Kerman’s autobiographical narrative, is all over the news and in our living rooms attempting to give us an insight of what life behind bars is like for women. The show has been criticized for inaccurately depicting the story of Piper Chapman, as the main character is called in the series. However, the broadcast and discussion of the story draws attention to the actual narrative by Piper Kerman on which the show is based. In her autobiographical novel also entitled Orange is the new Black, Kerman narrates her life in prison after being convicted of drug offense after 10 years. As a consequence of her actions in the past, Kerman was sentenced to 13 months in a federal prison facility. After her release, she put her experiences in writing to raise awareness of the flaws of the U.S. federal prison system. In her narrative, she draws attention to a number of different issues; among them the maltreatment of women of all colors, origins, backgrounds and sexes in American prisons. Consequently, the publication of her story offers shocking insights into the way incarcerated women are treated and thus highlights the necessity to talk about these horrifying practices.