Week 4: Black Women's Sexuality and 'Harmful Intimacy' 100 years later

Reflecting on “’Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl’”: Black Women’s Sexuality and ‘Harmful Intimacy’ in Early-Twentieth-Century New York,” by Cheryl D. Hicks, led me to think of Jenji Kohen’s celebrated television series on Netflix, “Orange is the New Black” (OITNB). Hicks explores questions of race, gender and sexuality in the 1910s and 1920s through the lens of 100 case files of inmates at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills. Exactly 100 years later, OITNB explores questions of race, gender and sexuality in the 2010s through the lens of the inmates of a women’s prison in upstate New York, based on the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, by Piper Kerman.

In some ways, not much has changed. Hicks documents the ways in which the “racial construction of sexuality” led authorities at Bedford to naturalize and essentialize black female sexuality as deviant. Hicks also describes the deep anxiety authorities felt over the “harmful intimacy” of white women attracted to or in intimate contact with black women.

In OITNB, the same themes and anxieties identified by Hicks still hold sway, at least as life in a women’s prison is portrayed by Piper Kerman, as adapted by Jenji Kohen. In the series, Piper, a bisexual white woman sentenced to a minimum security prison for her involvement in an international drug smuggling ring, has a sexual relationship while in prison with her ex-female lover, infuriating Healy, a prison officer and social worker who manages Piper’s case file. Piper’s “harmful intimacy” with another woman is only one of many examples of same-sex intimacy in the prison portrayed in OITNB, but because Piper is white and from an upper-middle-class background, Healy, like the prison officials in Hicks’ study, assumes Piper can be reformed and redeemed. Therefore, although he ignores or seems to take same-sex encounters among the other inmates in stride as somehow natural or “going with the territory,” evidence of Piper’s sexual “deviance” triggers in Healy an avalanche of anger and disgust.

Other characters include Mendez, one of the prison guards in OITNB. Mendez, like the prison officials described by Hicks, essentializes black and Latina inmates as inherently sexual, but he takes his demeaning, racist and sexist assumptions substantially further, dehumanizing the inmates of color and sexually assaulting them with impunity.

Some critics have blasted what they describe as OITNB’s racist portrayal of many of the inmates and the basic premise of a story largely about women of color in which the avenue in to their lives is via the character of an upper-middle-class white woman. But others have defended and celebrated the show for the ways in which they suggest Kohen, like Hicks, reveals the deeper humanity of the inmates by reflecting on their back stories, their motivations and the aspects of their lives that they generally hide within the prison walls. In this viewpoint, the racist language and stereotypes in the show are regularly questioned, critiqued and destabilized. And although Piper is the star of the show, her white privilege and her initial attempts to claim heterosexual privilege (waiting for her outside prison is her male fiancé, which Piper initially plays up, deflecting any suggestion that she is interested in intimate encounters with other women) are opened up to constant critique, undermining her own claims to the sympathy of the viewers. To the show's supporters, the characters of the other prisoners in OITBN are complex and generally sympathetic, standing in stark contrast to the attempts of some of the prison staff to dehumanize, simplify or essentialize them. For supporters, OITNB thus offers a powerful critique of the assumptions many Americans make about women – particularly women of color - in the prison system. Included among the characters OITBN presents in a strikingly sympathetic light is the trans woman Sophia, played by the transgender actress and advocate, Laverne Cox.

Kohen has suggested that she intended the show to be an exploration of the lives of a diverse cast of female inmates, but that she went with the real-life Piper Kerman’s true story as an accessible route in for mainstream white American television viewers. In an interview on NPR, Kohen said:

“In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it’s a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it’s relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It’s useful.”