Marxist Request Approved

                “Lesbian Request Denied”, the third episode in Orange is the New Black, contains many Marxist themes that reach beyond the prison culture. As a first time watcher, I've come to realize that the show aims to normalize the inmates and make the rest of the free, bourgeois class the bad guys. The structure of the show, which gives bits and pieces of each inmates’ own stories through the episode, focuses on the transgender woman Sophia this time. A true Marxist hero fighting the false consciousness of the ruling class that gender as a choice ruins a person’s rights, Sophia’s story highlights her struggles against the ruling class. To put things into perspective, a study on transgender prisoners in California found that under their criteria for a transgender, 30 -40% of prisoners in a women's prison fit the label, while only .2% of prisoners matched in a men’s (Sumner). She faces problems with her wife, her son, and even the general public as she is shunned by an old friend at the shoe store. The dominant ideology oppressing Sophia extends into her prison life, as the perverted guard Mendez aims to use her sexually for a materialistic trade off, which Sophia declines.

                From the moment she entered prison life, Piper has struggled with alienation. In this episode, Piper begins to feel disconnect with her fiance with an awkward phone call, and her bad luck with Crazy Eyes causes more drama for her with the prisoners. Piper’s alienation from her past bourgeois lifestyle collides with her inability to migrate into the lower class she’s now surrounded by, which leads to Piper’s false consciousness concerning her imprisonment. She begins to feel extremely victimized by everyone around her, turning her head to Alex until she finally confronts her. Marx heavily believed that consciousness resulted from social standing and togetherness, so Piper’s alienation causes her to see only innocence in herself and blame in others. Her confrontation with Alex reveals this, as she’s unable to hear Alex’s points about her lack of involvement without hard proof.

                Orange is the New Black has become my new obsession (I intended on writing on episode one having never seen the show and I’m about to start episode seven now), due to its honest and clever comments on how classes and materialistic ideals play into somewhere as foreign as a prison.

Source: Jennifer, Sumner, and Lori Sexton. "Lost in Translation: Looking for Transgender Identity in Women's Prisons and Locating Aggressors in Prisoner Culture." Critical Criminology 23.1 (2015): 1-20. Web of Science. Web. 6 June 2015.