- Title
- Orange is the New Black, Wentworth and Contemporary Media Feminisms: Systemic Inequality and Individual Responsibility
- Creator
- Ford, Jessica
- Relation
- Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives 4
- Publisher
- Peter Lang
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Many journalists and cultural commentators have drawn comparisons between the Australian women's prison drama Wentworth (2013- 21) and Netflix's US- set women's prison dramedy Orange is the New Black (2013- 19). However, the series differ considerably in their negotiation and representation of systemic inequality, the prison industrial complex and individual responsibility. This chapter considers how Wentworth and Orange is the New Black depict the women as subjects and/ or victims of patriarchal systems of power that work to imprison and disempower marginalized women. While Orange is the New Black emphasizes the role that systemic inequality (in the forms of sexism, poverty, racism, lack of access to education) plays in crime and incarceration, Wentworth highlights how each character's circumstances are a result of their individual choices. This chapter argues that these differing approaches to systemic inequality are representative of broader tendencies in media feminisms. Taken together, Orange is the New Black and Wentworth represent two different but important contributions to recent popular feminist discourses, and they highlight a key tension in recent negotiations of feminism on television.
- Subject
- wentworth; orange is the new black; prison drama; feminisms
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1466543
- Identifier
- uon:47583
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781789975062
- Language
- eng
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