Anne Schwan

Postfeminism Meets the Women in Prison Genre: Privilege and Spectatorship in Orange Is the New Black

This article argues that Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) uses postfeminist strategies to covertly promote prison reform and exercise a subtle critique of (female) mass incarceration while remaining constrained by the limitations of a postfeminist sensibility. Despite its contradictory and uneven agenda, OITNB should be seen as an important ally in the process of raising awareness about media (mis)representations of female prisoners, not least because of the program’s own self-reflexive commentary on tropes of the women in prison genre. The article calls for a tactical alliance between academic examinations of female imprisonment and critical sensibilities in popular culture to further more fundamental critiques of women’s incarceration, and its concomitant cost to individuals, families, and society.

Screening Women’s Imprisonment Agency and Exploitation in Orange Is the New Black

Since the time it was first broadcast in 2013 and despite its unquestionable commercial success, Netflix prison comedy-drama Orange Is the New Black has garnered equal shares of praise and blame. Countless articles have appeared in the popular press discussing the show’s treatment of race, sexuality, and class, as well as its depiction of the American prison system, while academics have also begun to comment on the series. This special issue aims to continue the work initiated on this important television series, while adding to a growing body of scholarship on popular representations of punishment in the age of US mass incarceration.

‘Bless the Gods for my pencils and paper’: Katie Gliddon's prison diary, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the suffragettes at Holloway

This article discusses the life and imprisonment of the largely unknown middle-class artist and British suffrage activist Katie Gliddon and analyzes her extensive prison diary, secretly written and drawn in her copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley at Londons Holloway Prison in March and April 1912. By creating a platform for the voices of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and by opening up a space for a transgressive gaze between suffragettes, ‘ordinary’ prisoners and female officers, Gliddons writings allow us to complicate our understanding of cross-class relations within the womens suffrage campaign and in womens prisons more generally speaking.

Dreadful beyond description: Mary Carpenter's prison reform writings and female convicts in Britain and India.

Mary Carpenter (1807–77) was one of mid-Victorian Englands most prolific social reformers, starting her career with a focus on the reformation of juvenile offenders. This article considers Carpenters writings on female convicts in Britain and India and illustrates how her ideas about criminal reformation become discursively connected with a larger project of building a coherent nation as the basis of a powerful empire. Carpenter constructs the bodies of women convicts in Britain and India as a threatening influence on future generations and the Empire as a whole and calls on white middle-class women to reform such ‘alien’ bodies. The essay explores the intersections of domestic female-led reformism and the imperial project of control over foreign bodies. It demonstrates that imperial history, the history of crime and punishment and gender history must be brought together in order to explore fully the convergence of ideologies of gender, class and racial identity in the mid-Victorian period.

Frederick William Robinson, Charles Dickens, and the Literary Tradition of ‘Low Life’

Frederick William Robinson, London-based journalist and author of over fifty titles of popular fiction, is easily dismissed as a hack writer who bowed to genre conventions and, under the pressure of commercial publishing, wrote too fast for his own good. The present chapter makes the case that Robinson’s largely forgotten fiction of ‘low life’, avidly read by his contemporaries and reviewed by writer colleagues such as Margaret Oliphant, deserves a closer look and critical reassessment similar to that recently bestowed on writers like Charles Reade.Contemporary reviews of Robinson’s novels about social problems, including his tales of street children, former thieves, and their long road to social ascent—Owen: A Waif (1862), Mattie: A Stray (1864), and Christie’s Faith (1867)—praised the author for his originality, if not his writing skills. Placed in a wider context of cultural and literary influences, Robinson’s oeuvre emerges as a missing link between the socially conscious literary traditions of Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, and mid-century social-problem novels, studies of working-class lives in investigations of urban poverty, British naturalism, and the slum fiction of the 1880s and 1890s. After an overview of Robinson’s work, method, and influences, my discussion will offer a case study of Owen: A Waif, illustrating this eclectic writer’s vision of class and family relations, working-class communities, and ideals of masculinity.