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From Screwdriver to Dildo: Retooling Womens Work in Orange Is the New Black

Television & New Media

Published online on

Abstract

This essay examines the depiction of labor in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, paying specific attention to gender and race. It argues that the program’s interest in the historical link between coerced prison labor and enslavement in the United States, as well as the more recent implication of prison privatization in the neoliberal assault on labor rights, is undermined by its privileging of affective and interpersonal dynamics over political solidarity.