Gender Stereotypes In Orange Is The New Black

Orange Is the New Black (2013-) is a web-series created by Jenji Kohan for Netflix. Based on the real-life experiences of Piper Kerman from her autobiography Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison (2010), the American comedy-drama (Wilson, 2014) follows Piper Chapman, played by Taylor Schilling, and her interaction with the women in Litchfield Penitentiary, a prison in upstate New York; a fictional version of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Orange Is the New Black “portrays characters in ways that perpetuate stereotypes and dominant ideologies” (Chavez, 2015) of gender, sexuality, race and the body. The show explores gender and sexuality in regards to identity, the hegemony of idyllic masculinity, femininity and its effect on the lives of the characters.

In the media, women are typically beheld through the “male gaze”, which sexualises how female characters in popular media are viewed through the eyes of heterosexual males (Mulvey, 1975). This was often seen in print and advertisements, where women were hypersexualised, though also portrayed as submissive and innocent. In contemporary media, specifically, in television, film, and even pornography, lesbian characters

For example, Piscatella exhibits an exaggerated form of masculinity by being violent and aggressive, as well as George Mendez, another prison guard who sexually assaults some of the prisoners, representing the idea of unapologetic male sexuality. On the other hand, Joe Caputo, the prison warden, is characterised to be non-confrontational and rather weak – traits that would not typically be seen as masculine. It is argued that these men are strategically represented as negative portrayals of masculinity to directly contrast the portrayals of femininity, inciting a critical approach from the