Gender Stereotypes In Orange Is The New Black

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In 2013, a new Netflix series called Orange Is The New Black was written by Jenji Kohan based on the book by Piper Kerman. The show almost instantly became a hit. The series takes place in a fictional women’s prison in upstate New York. It follows the life of Piper Chapman as she leaves her suburban life and adjusts to her new life in prison. The viewer, while seeing the past and present life of Piper, also gets to experience the past and present lives of the other inmates that Piper interacts with. The women represent a large variety of races/ethnicities, social classes, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Though Orange Is The New Black does show diversity, I would like to argue that despite the representation of diversity, the show portrays its characters in a way that propagates dominant ideologies and stereotypes. This is the one first shows to have a female lead with a large amount of female supporting characters about a women’s prison that has caught media attention around the world. The global recognition comes largely from the show being a Netflix Original Series. Netflix was founded in 1997 with the intention of the website to be able …show more content…

The “male gaze” is a term that expresses the process in which characters, typically female, have been sexualized for the heterosexual males watching the program. Lesbians in the past have been seen as sexual objects for heterosexual consumption (Herman, 2003). Unlike previous shows that have portrayed the “socially acceptable lesbian” as “gentle, sensitive, soft-hearted, soft spoken, absolutely non-butch, and stereotypically feminine” (Harrington, 2003, p. 216), Orange Is The New Black provides a wide range of lesbian characters. These lesbians include women of all races, ethnicities, gender identities, and social classes. These women, though having more multifaceted identities, are still based on

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