Since its 2013 premiere, Orange Is the New Black has become Netflix's most watched series, garnering critical praise and numerous awards and advancing the cultural phenomenon of binge-watching. . The series has sparked debate: does it celebrate diversity or is it told from the perspective of white privilege, with characters embodying some of the most racist and sexist stereotypes in television history? Examining the series from a feminist perspective, this book covers topics such as gender, race, class, sexuality, transgenderism, mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, disability, and sexual assault.
The topics included in this book reach from television as material culture at the British exhibition in the first half of the twentieth century, women’s roles in television production past and present, to popular 1960s television such as The Liver Birds and, in the twenty-first century, highly successful programmes including Orange is the New Black, Call the Midwife, One Born Every Minute and Wanted Down Under.