Deconstructed Desirability a Critical Study of Queer Sexualities in the TV Adaptation of Piper Kerman’s Orange Is the New Black

Abstract

With the intention to pinpoint queer identities within all-female correctional institutions, a research has been conducted on the TV series Orange Is the New Black, whose miscellany of queer personae allows for an inclusive examination. Essential to the study’s argumentation is, whether the prison environment provides women with the potential to rise above masculine power relations and norms, by way of adopting transgressive sexual patterns of behavior. Heterosexuality is limited to inmate-staff’s consensual and nonconsensual interactions. Expounded on through reference to the role imprisonment plays in its emergence, homosexuality is categorized into three different groupings within the confines. Thereafter, the discussion comes to an end by bringing to notice bisexual patterns of behavior. In closing, it is claimed that queer sexualities appear in women’s prisons more than the society at large; it is due both to the potentiality inmates’ primal concentration in an all-female correctional facility brings about, and deprivations and pains of imprisonment that cannot be dealt with, unless through substitution by queer sexuality.