The Age of Netflix

by Cory Barker

  For J. Halberstam, “queer time and place” are constituted by temporal and spatial logics that “develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction,” and that offer alternative ways of life and modes of being that extend queerness beyond its formulation as sexual identity.35 Considered this way, OITNB’s federal penitentiary setting exemplifies queer time and place: in its single-sex population; in its disruption of capitalist efficiency through its non-incentive wage system and underground economy; in inmates’ resistance to time’s binds—and those of the prison industrial complex—through their transformative experiences while incarcerated; and in its manifesting temporality’s relation to identity by fostering sexual fluidity, with inmates who are “gay for the stay,” non-monogamous, and gender variant. In all these ways, OITNB transforms prison into a counterpublic, which Michael Warner defines as

  publics defined by their tension with a larger public. Their participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general. Discussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols…. [P]articipation in such a public is one of the ways by which its members’ identities are formed and transformed.36

  We might thus consider the network of non-normative labor and kinship that OITNB’s inmates construct as existing outside of a capitalist and heterosexist economy, giving rise to an alternative in which, as Freeman writes, “time can be described as the potential for a domain of non-work dedicated to the production of new subject-positions and new figurations of personhood.”37

  Queer/ing Seriality and Sex

  Thomas Schatz notes that for all their boundary-pushing, Netflix, like premium cable, is “staking their futures on the most traditional of television products: series programming … signaling the persistence of the medium’s most fundamental characteristics.”38 Villarejo argues that such seriality creates “density” for recurring characters that is conducive to conveying queer storylines given “that familiarity is essential to enlisting understanding and sympathy.”39 As I argue in The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, the temporal structure of serial narrative also crucially allows for more complex understandings of sexual identity to emerge over time.

  Where the default to status quo structure of episodic television and the contained temporality of feature films create a pressure to resolve questions of sexuality, the narrative open-endedness and expanded time-frame that characterize serial television drama offer a particularly promising site for mounting long-range and multifaceted explorations into bisexual characters’ identities and experiences. Television narrative encourages bisexual representation by permitting it to unfold over time, necessary for the accumulation of experiences that renders bisexuality not practically viable—for any individual is potentially bisexual, no matter his or her behaviors to date—but rather representationally legible.40

  When Piper clarifies in the pilot that she was a lesbian “at the time” of her drug-related crime, it is the first of many references within the series to the temporal and otherwise contingent specificity determining any utterance of identity. A flashback to Piper in the first heat of her attraction to Alex has her reporting to best friend Polly (Maria Dizzia) “I like hot girls … and I like hot boys” (“Bora Bora Bora”). In the present tense of the same episode, a more mature Piper is less lookist but still protests “I’m not gay,” when Nicky questions her about reuniting with Alex, claiming “it was about comfort, not sex,” and that “I feel like I’m twenty-three and no time has passed. I think when you have a connection with someone it never really goes away.” In so saying, Piper acknowledges here the importance that emotional needs and history play in determining desire, and asserts her sexuality as constantly in flux, as becoming rather than being. Characters blind to this temporal contingency of sexuality are called out for it, as in the following exchange between Larry and Piper’s brother Cal from “Fool Me Once”:

  LARRY: Is [Piper] gay now?

  CAL: I don’t know about now. She is what she is.

  LARRY: Which is what exactly?

  CAL: I’m going to go ahead and guess that one of the issues here is that you think anyone needs to be “exactly” anything.

  Yet despite Piper’s resistance to naming herself bisexual (much-noted in the cultural discourse on the series), or ascribing to any sexuality identity in the present tense, OITNB effectively names her as such in characterizing her with conventional associations made between bisexuality and same-sex environment, criminality, infidelity, and white privilege. Other queer sexual identities find similarly ambivalent treatment within OITNB. Inmate Lorna’s (Yael Stone) delusions of having a faithfully waiting fiancée on the outside and her disavowal of her carrying on with Nicky discredit her as a character, with “gay for the stay,” like “hasbian” and “LUG [lesbian until graduation],” operating to contain queer sexual temporalities to the almost-extinct and the just a phase.41 Similarly, Big Boo’s dual outlaw nature as butch lesbian finds free expression in prison, whereas, Sasha T. Goldberg argues, she remains imprisoned insofar as her exceptionality within the media industry “reinforce[s] the notion of [butchness] as an outsider, solitary existence.”42 Season two reinforces this notion in painting Boo as increasingly abject, perverse, and isolated, from suggesting her carnal relationship with guide-dog “Little Boo” (“It got weird,” Boo admits), to making a predatory pass at newbie Brooke Soso (Kimiko Glenn), to finally selling out Red to rival Vee and being excommunicated from both camps as a result. As I write in The B Word, single-sex institutions “exist both for the purpose of and as a respite from gender socialization,” and screen narratives devoted to this spatio-temporal location, which include of course the women’s prison film, construct a safe space for “imagin[ing] how our logics of sexual desire might be reconceived along a more fluid range.”43 While OITNB occasionally falls back on the women’s prison tropes of predatory lesbians and mercenary bisexuals, it more prominently foregrounds romantic-erotic attachments between women. Such attachments and their capacity to flourish in all-female environments, as Freeman writes of the separate spheres of nineteenth-century Western social arrangements, are “above all temporal,” operating as “havens from a heartless world and, more importantly, as sensations that moved to their own beat.”44

  Berlant and Warner use the term “sexual publics” to signify how sex and intimacy are regulated so as to maintain privacy and privatization for heterosexuality, whereas homosexuality is policed and punished according to justifications of “public decency.”45 When C.O. Sam Healy (Michael Harney), attempting to reassure a traumatized Piper during their initial consultation, says, “This isn’t Oz,” referring to HBO’s prison drama that ran from 1997 to 2003, he offers a self-reflexive assurance to viewers about OITNB itself—in which even the rape, as defined by law, by C.O. Bennett of Daya, an inmate and thus unable to consent, is depicted in romanticized terms. Piper’s own coerced instatement as “prison wife” to Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren (Uzo Aduba) is defused of real threat when, in response to Piper’s pal Polly asking, “Did she rape you?” Piper is forced to answer, “No, but she held my hand” (“Lesbian Request Denied” [2013]). Yet what OITNB decidedly does not steer away from is consensual queer sex. In the trailer referenced at essay’s start, Piper is heard remarking on her love of “getting clean,” reminiscing, “It’s my happy place. Was my happy place,” over images tracing an infant Piper being bathed in the sink, to an adult Piper luxuriating in the bath, to she and Larry cuddling in a tub. What the trailer omits but OITNB’s pilot shows in its opening moments is an additional image in which Piper and Alex, shot from the waists up and bare breasts exposed, embrace under a shower’s stream. Censored from “mainstream” viewers but readily offered up to loyal subscribers at series’ start, this graphic (if titillating) depiction of queer desire is something OITNB does not shy from showing—indeed, in another s
cene from the pilot, Nicky is shown with her face buried in Lorna’s crotch, again while showering. What sex going on outside of prison we are shown takes place in flashback and is also queer: Alex orally pleasuring Piper on their first assignation, in early 1990s Northampton; inmate Poussey’s flashback to her young adulthood in Germany, as an Army brat, getting down with a buxom fräulein. What is noteworthy is that OITNB looks past straight sex, ignoring such opportunities as the frenzied affair between Larry and Polly in favor of the shirtless but de-eroticized glimpse we see of her post-breast-feeding. In its most extreme instance, OITNB displays its predilection for queer sex and queer spaces when it sends Larry and his father to a gay bathhouse unknowingly (Mr. Bloom had a Groupon). With male frontal nudity—rarely seen on screen outside of pornography—in full line of sight, and to the strains of men copulating in corners, Larry confides: “Prison changed [Piper]. It changes people. She was not a lesbian anymore, not with me. Then she’s in prison, what, a few weeks and she’s a lesbian again. Or bi? I don’t even know” (“Looks Blue, Tastes Red”). As with his earlier voicing of his confusion over Piper’s sexuality to Cal, here too it is Larry’s lack of imagination and understanding—rather than queer sex in public—that is depicted as problematic. Because the consensual sex in OITNB’s Litchfield is non-phallic, subversive, and survival-minded, its occurrence constitutes moments of jouissance that Lee Edelman promotes as resistant to the dictates of biological procreation and capitalist re-creation encapsulated within reproductive futurism: “Detached from its reproductive function,” writes Edelman, “sex can be envisioned as a subjective escape from a future pull that seems inevitable.”46 The queer sex that flourishes throughout Litchfield but tellingly sees the most action behind the altar of the under-patrolled chapel constitutes transgression of normative values both religious and repro-futuristic.

  “C’mon up to the [big] house”47

  Despite this reveling in queer sex as a non-reproductive mode of survival of the species, Litchfield’s women are still forced to hear their clocks ticking within the confines of a world in which an inmate’s “date” refers to her release rather than an act of romantic courtship or marriage. Aptly illustrated by the publicity image announcing OITNB’s second season, depicting an egg cracked in half to reveal days ticked off in anticipation, women who spend their procreative years behind bars suffer diminished opportunities to experience biological motherhood. “I told Piper it’s much harder to conceive in your later 30s,” Carol Chapman offers up on her first visit to Litchfield in “Lesbian Request Denied.” “That’s just what I need right now,” Piper responds sarcastically, “a reminder of my ebbing fertility.” Tried and sentenced as adults but effectively stalled in acquiring status as women (heteronormatively defined by marrying and mothering), and largely abandoned by their families once inside (if not before), inmates become wards of the state with incarceration grounds for rejection of their autonomy. Thus female inmates embody a prolonged adolescence that reveals itself as queer both in its polymorphous perversity and in its liminality—not yet contained by the perceived imperative of sexual identity labeling and its ostensible marker in sexual coupling. Given this, inmates display resistance to heteronormative and chronobiopolitical binds even as they remain bound in incarceration. Likewise, OITNB’s prison familial structure displays a spatio-temporality akin to the stretched-out adolescences of queer subjects and queer subcultures that Halberstam describes as “transient, extrafamilial, and oppositional modes of affiliation,” while also working to reveal the alienation and perverseness that characterizes heteropatriarchal family.48

  Biological fathers in OITNB are largely shown to be absent or damaging; notably, Piper’s father Bill Chapman (Bill Hoag) remains nearly as unseen as Litchfield’s male warden, justifying his refusal to visit by saying in “40 Oz. of Furlough (2014),” “I’m sorry, honey, but I just can’t see you like that. You’re my little girl. That woman in there—that’s not who you are,” to which Piper responds, “That’s exactly who I am.” Piper’s recognition of herself as inextricably tied to her past acts and present experiences constitutes a sobering yet necessary revelation in self-acceptance, signaled in the linguistic echo that links her ostensible past and present selves when she recalls, in the pilot, “It got scary, and then I ran away, and then I became the nice blonde lady I was supposed to be.” With these words, Piper recounts her narrative of non-belonging in the criminal world that she escaped to fulfill her “true” self. Yet her self-description as a “nice blonde lady” is identical to that used by Alex in convincing Piper that she can pass through airport customs, drug money in tow, without raising suspicion. In both scenarios, Piper’s “nice blonde lady” is a disguise, and the white privilege it alludes to is that which allows her untrammeled access between worlds as well as the illusion of a self who is liberated from crime.

  Mr. Chapman’s insistence on infantilizing and idealizing his daughter finds its converse within Alex’s flashback in “Fucksgiving” (2013), when her search to find her absentee birth father brings her face to face with a has-been rock star who immediately and inappropriately sexualizes her, sending her straight into the grasp of drug-dealer Fahri (Sebastian La Cause), a father surrogate under whose tutelage she will become criminalized. Nor does OITNB let biological mothers off the hook, but rather condemns Carol Chapman’s Stepford Wife–like denials as well as the selfish mothering endured by Nicky and Daya. In parsing whether OITNB endorses single parenthood on the outside, however, I am skeptical; we are encouraged to raise an eyebrow when Daya’s mother and fellow inmate Aleida (Elizabeth Rodriguez) comforts her about the prospect of raising alone the child she conceived with C.O. Bennett, saying, “You was raised in a non-traditional setting and you turned out great” (“Take a Break from Your Values” [2014]).49 And though we are urged to find transgender inmate Sophia’s (Laverne Cox) wife unreasonable in her plea to her then-transitioning spouse to remain anatomically male, it seems we are meant to agree with her assessment that their child needs a paternal role model when she tells Sophia, in “Lesbian Request Denied,” “Do your time, so you can be a father to your son.”

  Berlant and Warner describe queer kinship as

  relations and narrative that are only recognized as intimate in queer culture: girlfriends, gal pals, fuckbuddies, tricks. Queer culture has learned not only how to sexualize these and other relations, but also to use them as a context for witnessing intense and personal affect while elaborating a public world of belonging and transformation. Making a queer world has required the development of the kind of intimacy that bears no relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple formation, to property, or to the nation.50

  Though under the male correctional officers’ thumbs, Litchfield inmates establish matriarchal structures that, when compassionately conceived, are monitored both from the top down and the bottom up. Most prominently, Red serves as the tough-but-fair mother figure first seen doling out contraband yogurts to her “kids,” but unafraid to enact punishment when Piper’s ill-advised complaint about prison cuisine leads to Red’s starving her out and humiliating her with an English muffin-encased dish deemed “Tampon Surprise,” in “Tit Punch” (2013). After Red more fervently punishes another surrogate daughter, relapsed addict Tricia (Madeline Brewer), with permanent exile, then indirectly causes another “daughter,” Gina (Abigail Savage), to be badly scarred, Red is stripped of status as both chef and mother to her girls. When she finally acquiesces to make amends, the reuniting of a queer family is staged to evoke a reunion of biological family. Even accounting for the limited range of hair dyes available at commissary, the similarly red-haired, fair-skinned women gathered around the table for Red’s peace offering meal–Nicky, Gina, Sister Ingalls (Beth Fowler), Norma (Annie Golden)—suggest that their family ties have grown so strong as to have taken on the markers of biological resemblance. As the apology Red proceeds to make in “40 Oz. of Furlough” segues into a vow to chief confidante Norma, Red’s words take on the sh
adings of a marriage proposal: “I’m willing to make this more of a democracy; I just want my family back…. My dear Norma, you’ve been by my side for many years. You’re my best friend. You’ve stood by me, listened to me, plucked the hair that grows from that weird mole on the back of my arm. I’ve missed you so much. Thank you for giving me another chance.” When mute Norma nods her assent, their “daughters” looking on as witnesses, the queer family is consecrated.