by Cory Barker
It bears reminding that this commemorated queer family is one initially formed around racial alignment; as Piper finds out upon arriving at Litchfield, the prison population is informally organized according to a racially-ordained kinship system that Lorna excuses as “tribal, not racist.” I lack the space here to interrogate OITNB’s not always enlightened treatment of race, despite its racially inclusive casting.51 But the troubling racial implications OITNB raises in affirming the white family while pathologizing the black family are clear enough: vindictive Vee emerges as Red’s foil, functioning as the bad mother who insists on allegiance, demands reciprocity, and reinforces cultural scripts about dead-end prospects, shooting down Taystee’s professional ambition by chiding her, “Girl, you from this ’hood. You don’t get a career, you get a job.” The perversity of the “forever family,” the promise with which Vee lures the orphaned Taystee into her criminal organization, is signaled by Vee seducing, then ordering killed, the surrogate son who has, sans Vee’s permission, gone into business on his own. Rematerializing out of Taystee’s past to invade her present and resume her bullying, Vee exercises vigilant surveillance over the relationship between Taystee and Poussey, pressing the former, “Why do you keep defending [Poussey] over your family?” and, upon seeing them suggestively cuddling, warning Taystee, “When you get out of here you don’t want people on the block talkin’ about how you went that way” (“A Whole Other Hole” [2014]). Vee’s homophobic surveillance of her self-appointed gang parallels C.O. Healy’s, whose paranoia sends Piper to the Solitary Housing Unit (S.H.U.) when she is caught “dirty dancing” with Alex in “Fucksgiving.” Vee’s panoptical gaze is conjoined with that of Healy with the latter’s misguided attempt to start up a therapy group he names Safe Space, wherein the quotidian threat of surveillance behind bars gets a boost from the imperative to confess. Pushing Poussey to confide her feelings, Healy’s oblivious entreaty that “We have to watch out for each other” carries an irony that is anything but comforting, as only Healy is unaware that Poussey, on suspicion of squealing about Vee’s heroin operation, is subject to the menacing gaze of Vee’s emissary Suzanne (“Take a Break from Your Values”). Taystee eventually weans herself from the overbearing, abusive mother, telling Vee in “Hugs Can Be Deceiving” (2014), “I’m feeling like I already gave you too much of my time”; a stinging reproach, and one that OITNB echoes when it kills off the character whom many viewers found too villainous by half at season two’s end.
Flashbacks to the Queer Future
The stylistic technique that seems most evident of Matt Zoller Seitz’s observation that “in content as well as form OITNB is a modestly revolutionary show” is surely its use of flashbacks.52 Despite its normalization in narrative film and television, the flashback is stylistically radical in its reflexivity and non-linearity, and its use nearly always signals disturbance—whether of a traumatic memory impinging on the present or of a recollection so pleasurable that is provokes a yearning to return to the past. Moreover, as Maureen Turim notes, flashbacks serve to interpolate viewers into identifying with characters through the subjective revealing of history:
If flashbacks give us images of memory, the personal archives of the past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past…. This process can be called the “subjective memory,” which here has the double sense of the rendering of history as a subjective experience of a character in the fiction, and the formation of a Subject in history as the viewer of the film identifying with fictional character’s [sic] positioned in a fictive social reality.53
Flashbacks are stylistically as well as temporally radical in being by definition non-teleological, resisting the imperative towards progress and futurity’s pull and in so doing evincing the famous Faulkner axiom “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”54 In a singular instance within “Lesbian Request Denied,” the past fuses with the present with the use of a single (trick) shot showing transgender inmate Sophia’s transition from her assigned gender identity as “Marcus” (played by actress Cox’s real life twin brother M. Lamar) to her chosen identity. Given this episode’s focus on Sophia’s panic when budget cuts deny her the necessary estrogen dosage, this time-shifting shot visualizes the constant threat of slippage back into the past that renders a gender-transitioning inmate dependent and desperate. Indispensable for establishing viewer identification with each inmate among OITNB’s ensemble, these episodic forays into characters’ pasts via flashback establish the unfortunate constellation of factors that led to each woman’s incarceration; overwhelmingly, it was lack of economic resources (whether for material needs, education, healthcare, or legal defense) that was significantly if not wholly to blame. But even as these individual histories reveal the extent and consequences of America’s poverty epidemic, they also revise cultural scripts by resisting ahistorical, decontextualized narratives. The result is to unbind characters from the representational regime of stereotyping as well as from the legal regime of criminalizing, humanizing each character and qualifying if not exonerating her of her crime(s).
As the season one trailer discussed at essay’s start indicates, in the eyes of her biological, traditional family, Piper’s sexually curious susceptibility to being seduced by Alex is what ostensibly led to her incarceration and perceived failure as a straight citizen, in both senses. This conflation of queerness with failure—of heterosexuality, of repro-futurity, of bourgeois capitalism—is ideologically ingrained. “The queer body and queer social worlds become the evidence of that failure,” writes Halberstam, “while heterosexuality is rooted in a logic of achievement, fulfillment, and success(ion).”55 OITNB’s other “bad family” and its matriarch Vee share the elder Chapmans’ conflation of non-futurity with failure, evidenced in Vee’s scolding of her surrogate daughter “Black Cindy” (Adrienne C. Moore) when the latter blows off her orders as Vee’s drug deputy, in “Comic Sans.” “That probably worked back when folks were expected to check out at forty,” lectures Vee. “Thing is, if you’re not building a future, that’s because you don’t believe there is a future. You’ve given up on yourself. You’re a loser.” The perverse work ethic that Vee preaches, though an echo of capitalist dogma, all but guarantees a future behind bars if not the life cut short that awaits Vee. Yet neither does OITNB offer the blindly carpe diem rejection of futurity that Alex proposes to Piper, saying, “I’m not planning anything. I don’t know what’s going to happen, that’s the point of being with me”—a seductive fantasy but one Piper (and we) have by season two’s end come to understand as avoidant and self-serving.
Edelman’s urging for a queer oppositionality that is future-negating did not find favor throughout queer theory.56 Without succumbing to the hollow notion that “it gets better,” queer scholars of color in particular see it as essential to maintain belief, as José Esteban Muñoz attests, that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope.”57 For the disenfranchised characters of OITNB and their real life counterparts, it is difficult to deny that which Dustin Bradley Goltz posits: “Given the way discourses of future punish queerness, hope marks a site of political struggle and urgency, for, as [Gloria] Anzaldúa reminds us in This Bridge Called My Back, ‘hopelessness is suicide.’”58 For Goltz, this more moderate position imagines queerness contending with heteronormativity’s “ongoing project of hijacking the future” by vigilantly critiquing the status quo, “working within the present—rejecting the tragic forecasting of heteronormativity’s threats, with a ‘day at a time’ orientation towards unseen futures.”59 Above all, OITNB’s characters challenge what our punitive rather than rehabilitative system of incarceration dictates: rather than killing time, they queer time, producing what Freeman describes as “new social relations and even new forms of justice that counter the chrononormative and chronobiopolitical … forms of time on which both a patriarchal generationality and a maternalized middle-class domesticity”—and, I would add, a neoliberal capitalist economy—“lean on for their meaning,”
with the result being one “of transformation rather than of shared victimhood.”60
Discourses on television’s futurity steer to similar extremes, with dystopian forecasts of “the end of television” countered by utopian rhetoric of creative autonomy, indie TV, virtual entrepreneurs, and participatory media. In assessing whether Internet television really constitutes an overhaul of the corporate management and economic arrangements profiting Hollywood’s big media groups, it is important to recall that Netflix turned to original content in an attempt to compensate for losing the virtual monopoly it had acquired as an early adopter of media streaming, as expired licensing deals and rising competition from rival content providers like Hulu and Amazon increasingly threatened Netflix’s market advantage. Also crucial to remember is that it is not, for the foreseeable future, within Netflix’s control to radically shift the entertainment industry’s power structure, given that Netflix remains dependent on licensing fees, priced at the discretion of film and television studios. Even original content such as OITNB is “exclusively” controlled by Netflix only for first-window streaming rights. Suggesting a still hazier future, some media analysts predict the likelihood that cable-systems operators will compensate for the loss in profit from bundling cable packages (as the result of “cord-cutters” and “cord-nevers”) by shifting their business model to focus on selling broadband service, such as Verizon and AT&T are already doing.61 In the event that these broadband providers successfully appeal the FCC’s recent passing of net neutrality regulations protecting streaming services, Netflix could be faced with inflated costs or data caps for streaming bandwidth.62 Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos freely admits to how its non-normative programming model is economically profitable, even as he hitches that financial incentive, in the very next sentence, to a nationalistic notion of freedom:
To make all of America do the same thing at the same time is enormously inefficient [and] ridiculously expensive…. There is a freedom achieved when your options extend beyond the night’s offerings and the limited selection of past episodes that networks make available on demand. Specifically, it’s the freedom to only watch television you enjoy.63
In linking viewer freedoms to free market policies, Sarandos positions Netflix as the neoliberal alternative to an outmoded model redolent of no less than socialism in its implied conformity and scarcity. Yet as the first generation of Internet television viewers have discovered, the liberation that comes with expanded access and choice may prove overwhelming and ultimately impoverishing. “With Internet television, customers have grown accustomed to the idea that they might really have it all, whenever they want,” writes Ken Aueletta. “What’s unclear is whether that freedom will cost more than the current bargain.”64
Though it may be seen as constituting a similarly utopian disregard for reality and mortality, OITNB’s second season ends with an image that evocatively visualizes queer imaginings of individual and collective transformation realizable through a radical temporality that transcends past, present, and future and the chrononormative, chronobiopolitical imperative each confers. Handed a death sentence in the form of a terminal cancer diagnosis with no prison funding for further care, former bank robber and long-time convict Rosa (Barbara Rosenblat) seizes her moment to escape, commandeering the prison transport van to speed off into the proverbial sunset to the rising chords of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” (“We Have Manners. We’re Polite” [2014]). At this moment of liberation from the various incarcerations of place, class, race, age, and illness, Rosa visually transforms back into the brazen firebrand she once was. In its ecstatic affirmation of a self who is unconstrained by either time’s binds or that of socially dictated subjectivity, it is a moment of untrammeled jouissance. Alas it is but a fantasized escape, yet in its projection on screen we can imagine its possibility. At their best, both Netflix and OITNB offer a similar view beyond, to a queer time and place both televisual and societal.
NOTES
This essay is expanded from and inspired by a brief visual essay I published as part of an Orange Is the Black theme week in In Media Res, and I am indebted to my co-contributors and our respondents within that forum for their valuable insights. See Maria San Filippo, “Doing Time: Queer Temporalities in Orange Is the New Black,” In Media Res, March 10, 2014, accessed January 22, 2016, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2014/03/10/doing-time-queer-temporalities-and-orange-new-black.
1. J. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 2.
2. “A Better Son/Daughter,” the first track on the 2002 album The Executioner of All Things, was recorded when Lewis was the frontwoman for the band Rilo Kiley.
3. OITNB creator Jenji Kohan referred to Piper as “my Trojan horse” on Fresh Air, NPR, August 13, 2013, accessed February 16, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2013/08/13/211639989/orange-creator-jenji-kohan-piper-was-my-trojan-horse.
4. Quoted in Gary Needham, “Scheduling Normativity: Television, the Family, and Queer Temporality.” In Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics, ed. Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (New York: Routledge, 2009), 144.
5. Kohan, Fresh Air.
6. Victor Luckerson, “After Disaster, Netflix Is Back from the Brink,” Time, October 21, 2013, accessed January 22, 2016, http://business.time.com/2013/10/21/how-netflix-came-back-from-the-brink/.
7. Sonali Basak, “‘Orange Is the New Black’ Vaults Netflix Past 50 Million Users,” Bloomberg, July 21, 2014, accessed January 22, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-21/-orange-is-new-black-vaults-netflix-past-50-million-subs.html.
8. Amy Villarejo, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 77.
9. Ken Auletta, “Outside the Box,” The New Yorker, February 3, 2014, 54.
10. Nancy Hass, “And the Award for the New HBO Goes To,” GQ, February 2013, accessed January 22, 2016, http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201302/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house-of-cards-arrested-development.
11. Needham, “Scheduling Normativity,” 145.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Tim Wu, “Netflix’s War on Mass Culture,” New Republic, December 4, 2013, accessed January 22, 2016, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115687/netflixs-war-mass-culture.
15. Kohan, Fresh Air.
16. Emma Daly, “How Many People Are Watching Netflix?” RadioTimes, February 27, 2014, accessed January 22, 2016, www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-02-27/how-many-people-are-watching-netflix.
17. “Comments,” in San Filippo, “Doing Time.”
18. Aaron is careful to clarify that this notion of queer viewership as non-monogamous “is not to associate it with promiscuity … I am not rendering queer untrue, only uncontained, and in doing so bringing into relief the normative logic that it offsets.” Michele Aaron, “Towards Queer Television Theory,” in Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics, ed. Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (New York: Routledge, 2009), 71–72.
19. See Jaap Kooijman, “Cruising the Channels: the Queerness of Zapping,” in Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics, ed. Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (New York: Routledge, 2009), 159–171.
20. Aaron, “Towards Queer Television Theory,” 72.
21. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was originally slated for broadcast on NBC but was sold to Netflix.
22. Margaret Lyons, “Lesbians Are Having the Best Summer Ever on TV,” Vulture, July 25, 2013, accessed January 22, 2016, http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/lesbians-are-having-the-best-summer-ever-on-tv.html.
23. “Comments,” in San Filippo, “Doing Time.”
24. Villarejo, Ethereal Queer, 90.
25. See, for example, Jim Pagels, “Stop Binge-Watching TV,” Slate, July 9, 2012, accessed January 22, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/07/09/binge_watching_tv_why_you_need_to_stop.html.
26. Timothy Stenovec, “One of the ‘Most Talked About TV Shows’ of 2014 Wasn’t
on TV,” Huffington Post, December 9, 2014, accessed January 22, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/orange-is-the-new-black-most-talked-about-facebook_n_6291114.html.
27. Kohan, Fresh Air.
28. Phillip Maciak, “Streaming Pam Beesley,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 9, 2013, accessed January 22, 2016, http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/deartv/streaming-pam-beesly/; emphasis in original.
29. Lili Loofbourow, “How Recaps Changed the Way We Think about TV—and Our Lives,” The Guardian, November 4, 2014, accessed January 22, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/nov/04/how-recaps-changed-the-way-we-think-about-tv.
30. Quoted in Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
31. Carla Freccero, et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ, 13.2–3 (2007): 187.
32. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 98.
33. I thank Vernon Shetley for making me aware of Pryor’s routine, viewable at (accessed February 16, 2016) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xc501v_richard-pryor-on-arizona-penitentia_shortfilms.
34. I thank Daisy Ball for bringing this issue of the shackling of pregnant prisoners to my attention; see Ball, “The Essence of a Women’s Prison: Where Orange Is the New Black Falls Short,” In Media Res, March 14, 2014, accessed January 22, 2016, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2014/03/14/essence-womens-prison-where-orange-new-black-falls-short. For the International Human Rights Clinic’s report, see https://ihrclinic.uchicago.edu/page/shackling-pregnant-prisoners-united-states.
35. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 1–2.