“Everything Is Different the Second Time Around”

The Netflix Effect: Binging without Boundaries

Loosely defined as consuming two or more episodes of a single television series in one sitting, the practice of binge-watching has been traced to mid-1990’s X-Files fans (Zimmer 2013). Contemporary streaming services have drastically altered the binge-watching phenomenon, leading Sidneyeve Matrix (2014, 120) to suggest “binge viewing and Netflix are becoming synonymous.” A 2013 survey conducted about Netflix found that among 1,500 U.S. adults who stream at least one TV show a week, 61 percent binge-watch regularly (Charter Communications 2013). Similarly, Business Insider’s 2013 study shows that 88 percent of people expect to watch more than one episode at a time. While this “Netflix effect,” a term coined by Matrix, reiterates Elissa Bassist’s (2013, 3) argument that “the phenomenon of Netflix has trained our viewership” practices, the practice itself remains stigmatized.

The stigma of binging emerges dually from its psychological and physical consequences. Pointing to the ways stigma causes shame (Goffman 1963), “binge-watching” carries connotations of stigmatized behavior, as “binge” borrows from addiction discourses; the term binge is clinical in nature and often applies to negative, excessive activities like drinking, eating, and killing. Health scholars Francisco Xavier Basterra-Gortari et al. (2014) found that binge-watching television may be deadlier than sitting at a desk or driving a car all day. According to this study, consuming more than three hours of television each day is directly associated with higher rates of mortality in diabetes and cardiovascular disease, regardless of physical activity and diet. Black compares binge-watching to drug addiction (cited in Wagstaff 2014, para. 5), and Lyubomirsky, an expert on happiness, suggests that the immediate gratification involved with binge-watching may lead to unhappiness (cited in Dahl 2014).

Despite warnings from medical practitioners, binge-watching has yet to be fully explored by media scholars. We recognize that as the practice continues to gain popularity, the stigma may lessen (Paskin 2013). For the purposes of academic research, we suggest this form of concentrated critical viewing can be a productive research tool that provides a different way of approaching the text. Because of stigma’s necessarily relational characteristics, the shame and guilt of binging can be dissolved depending on context and purpose. We use “marathon viewing” to rename the process of consuming mass amounts of television for the purpose of research and/or critical analysis. Reframing the process transforms the act from compulsive to intentional and denotes critical effort on the part of the viewer. Marathon viewing extracts feelings of shame and guilt, while providing a method of analysis, embedded in today’s hyper-media culture, for the purpose of social change.

Marathon viewing is a direct result of the ways in which new media have altered the temporality of our viewing practices. Because streaming services, such as Netflix, provide access to television programs “disconnected from scheduled television,” a temporal shift happens, allowing for marathon viewing (Jenner 2016, 9). Rob Cover’s (2005) examination of temporality and DVDs suggests consuming a television series all at once gives the viewer control over the temporality of viewing. Streaming an entire series upon its release provides even more control. Whereas DVD sets require scholars wait for a television series to finish airing before accessing it on DVD, streaming services provide critics the opportunity to begin analysis the moment a series is released. Accessing an entire series upon its release is particularly useful for critical media scholars. As feminist media scholars argue, looking for socio-cultural patterns when making arguments about television texts is an integral aspect of the research process (Dow 1996), and having the ability to watch the episodes of a television program cumulatively undoubtedly aids in detecting those patterns (Cuklanz and Moorti 2006).

The availability of multiple media platforms also advances the critical process. According to Henry Jenkins’ (2006, 15–16) theory of convergence, the flow of content across multiple platforms “alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, genres and audiences” and the way consumers process media texts. Convergence “represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (Jenkins 2006, 3). While engaging in marathon viewing, we used various technologies (i.e., phones and laptops) to access multiple web-based media platforms (i.e., IMDB and Google Scholar) to garner information about the actors, series, and critical theories that go on to inform our critical viewing practice. Indeed, we immersed ourselves within the flow of content, sought new information, and made connections that led to our arguments about aging women on OITNB.

Collaborative marathon viewing provides the opportunity to bring together a multiplicity of voices to understand the system within which texts are produced and meaning is made, much like feminist consciousness raising (CR), collaborative writing, and the goals of feminist media studies. According to Anne Koedt et al. (1973, 280–81), CR is an act “in which personal experiences, when shared, are recognized as a result not of an individual’s idiosyncratic history and behavior, but of the system.” Lisa Hogeland (1998), Joanne Frye (1986), and Cheri Register (1975) apply CR to literature, suggesting that the multiplicity of voices in writing can offer shared experiences for female readers, and Rachel Silverman (2014) extends this process to pop-culture texts. Because feminist media studies understands society to be “a terrain of domination and resistance” that media reproduces (Kellner 1995, 4), feminist analyses are “critical of how power operates through classification and categories” (Walby and Anais 2015, 208). Feminist media scholars critically engage with media texts to critique the reproduction of oppressive relationships and “advanc(e) the democratic process” (Kellner 1995, 4). Implicit in the term “feminist” media studies is “an activist and interventionist agenda and a questioning of the taken-for-granted” (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015, 3). We offer marathon viewing as a new method for feminist media studies and critical textual analysis informed by the convergence of today’s mediascape. Marathon viewing as a method of analysis provides scope for a multiplicity of voices across multiple platforms and an interventionist agenda through critical popular responses and scholarly work. OITNB is an exemplary text that, as Anne Schwan (2016) notes elsewhere in this issue, “has the potential to mobilize awareness and activist sensibilities.”

We employ marathon viewing as our method of analysis and we couple it with the act of collaborative writing. Collaborative writing, like collaborative autoethnography, is situated within “the traditions of critical theory” and “aligns activist research by capturing the process of praxis” (Cann and DeMeulenaere 2012, 147). Collaborative writing allows us to “expose and engage” our internalized scripts (Norris and Sawyer 2012, 289), reflect on the critical process, and interpret each other’s work (Lapadat 2009). In tandem with the convergence of media inherent to marathon viewing, collaborative writing provides an opportunity to interrogate and intervene with media texts and our process of critical analysis. Through this combination of methods, we became aware of how the stigma of temporality operates within OITNB as both a way to highlight the faults of the PIC and also condemn women to pejorative stereotypes.

The Stigma of Temporality

Our analysis of OITNB is informed by and extends Erving Goffman’s (1963) work on stigma. Goffman defines stigma as that which causes an individual to be disqualified from social acceptance. The stigmatized exist within a language of relationships, not attributes; social settings establish the categories of relationships and the routines of social intercourse. There is no inherently stigmatized person or group; stigma necessarily relies on context and situation. According to Goffman, there are three types of stigmas: stigmas of character, group identity, and physicality. With regard to character, Goffman (1963, 4) includes attributes perceived as “weak will, domineering or unnatural passions . . . (and) dishonesty.” Goffman (1963, 4) refers to group identity stigmas as “tribal,” based on race, nation, and religion; tribal stigma can also include socio-economic status, pointing to the ways that context and relationships play a role in determining which attributes are stigmatized, while physical stigmas are “abominations of the body . . . various physical deformities” (Goffman 1963, 4). Moreover, stigma tends to “spread from the stigmatized individual to [her] close connections” providing a reason to avoid such people (Goffman 1963, 30).

As noted by Frieda, one of OITNB’s elderly inmates, in this article’s epigraph, “no one gives a shit about old ladies;” people avoid the elderly because they embody the stigma of age and mortality. Feminist scholars have explored this stigmatization of the elderly and its particular impact on women. In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir (1996, 2) claims, “society’s attitude towards the old is deeply ambivalent.” Old age arouses a “biological repugnance” from which people tend to dissociate (de Beauvoir 1996, 217). Moreover, as a result of patriarchal ideologies and academic structural biases, elderly women are more misunderstood than men, increasing their stigmatization (Kearney 2009). Susan Sontag (1972, 29) claims this “double standard of aging” acts as an instrument of oppression against women. Toni Calasanti and Kathleen Slevin (2006, 1) suggest “an inadvertent but pernicious ageism burdens much of feminist scholarship.” And Deborah Jermyn (2013, 75) claims older women are “culturally passive” in regard to society’s masculinized framework “by virtue of both their gender and age.” Despite academic writing about elderly women as a stigmatized group, they do not seem to fit clearly within one of Goffman’s categorizations. As such, in analyzing the elderly inmates on OITNB, we rely on Goffman’s claim that stigmas are both contextual and relational and in doing so extend Goffman’s work for feminist purposes. We understand the elderly women on OITNB as stigmatized by their age, which is, within the confines of Litchfield, a stigma that both traverses and evades the three categories of character.

The Golden Girls of Litchfield: Sites of Activism

OITNB prominently features elderly women within the narrative, which remains something of a rarity on television. ³ Studies regarding the portrayals of elderly women on television, which date back to the 1970s, claim elderly women are “largely out of focus in popular culture” (Whelehan and Gwynne 2014, 1) and significantly underrepresented (Jermyn 2013; Robinson and Skill 1995; Roy and Harwood 1997; Signorielli 2004; Vernon et al. 1990). They are seen less often and have less productive roles than older men (Roy and Harwood 1997; Signorielli 2004; Vernon et al. 1990). As well, studies have found an “abysmally low percentage of African American older adults and no older adults from other ethnic groups” (Roy and Harwood 1997, 50). OITNB, a show that features a large percentage of aging women (seven characters across the three seasons), including women of color, is, thus, an important text for analysis as such women have been rarely represented on the small screen.

For our purposes, we define aging women as over the age of fifty. In other cases, we rely on signifiers such as menopause or how long an individual has been in prison. For instance, Piper explains that many of the older inmates were “transferred up from max [maximum security] for good behavior” (“A Whole Other Hole”). The Golden Girls tribe consists of Taslitz and Frieda, white inmates in prison for killing and maiming their husbands respectively; Jimmy, an eighty-one-year-old white inmate with dementia; Irma, a black inmate; and Red, a white inmate who joins the Golden Girls after being exiled from the “white tribe.” ⁴ Many of the aging characters on OITNB self-identify as part of the Golden Girls tribe, while others do not. Other aging female inmates who are not part of the Golden Girls affiliation include Vee, ⁵ a black woman, newly re-incarcerated in season 2, who becomes the leader of the “black tribe,” and Miss Rosa, a Latina inmate with cancer, confined to temporary housing. OITNB signals the elderly by their role on the show, their health, or their lack of racial tribe. The category of age is both contextual and relational, as stigmas often are. Through the characters Jimmy and Rosa, OITNB uses the stigma of temporality for change. Conversely, the characters Red and Vee feature the oppressive nature of stigma.

The representation of Jimmy highlights the lack of health care and funding for elderly inmates. Claiming to be “twenty-three,” Jimmy exists in a world where Lyndon Johnson is president, and she is married to “Jack” who is “picking her up for the movies later.” Sitting in the cafeteria, Jimmy comments, “these are great seats. You can really see the stage from here” (“Looks Blue, Tastes Red”). Jimmy’s dementia appears to be common knowledge among the inmates and the guards, yet goes untreated. Jimmy is so invisible that she is able to wander off the prison grounds to a local bar where she believes she is watching Jack play bass. Despite the fact that Jimmy is put under twenty-four hour surveillance after her escape, she again wanders away, this time breaking her arm when jumping from the chapel stage into what she imagines is a body of water. Unwilling to pay for the “full time care at a dedicated facility” that she needs, the prison grants Jimmy “compassionate release” (“Comic Sans”). According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Prisons, compassionate release procedures require that a prisoner be sixty-five or older, suffer from chronic or serious medical conditions related to aging, experience deteriorating mental or physical health, and has served 50 percent of her sentence (U.S. Department of Justice 2015). OITNB constructs compassionate release as far from merciful. Instead, as Taslitz explains, because Jimmy has no family or income, she will end up on the street and be “dead in a week” (“Appropriately Sized Pots”).

The show’s portrayal of compassionate release procedures is exaggerated. As explained by Rachel Nuwer (2014), sick and elderly prisoners do not get booted to the bus stop with no food, money, or family support—in fact, the process of applying for compassionate release is lengthy, and the application includes details about the inmate’s post-release plan of residence, how they will finance their life, and what social support is available. “In actuality, the real problem with compassionate release is just the opposite of what Jimmy experienced: infirm inmates who do or should qualify for release are unjustly kept in prison” (Nuwer 2014). More often, “for women prisoners with medical concerns . . . their punishment is compounded by their inability to obtain care and treatment” (Chandler 2003, 43). We see this to be the case with cancer sufferer Rosa, who would have been a much better choice for compassionate release. Rosa is re-introduced in season 2 when she climbs painfully into the prison van. On her way to “get poison pumped into (her) veins” (“A Whole Other Hole”), Rosa is completely bald and breathing heavily, as though the work of stepping into the van is too much for her.

Rosa highlights the real problem with compassionate release—she is terminally ill and left in prison, rather than released to her family’s care. As the season continues, we learn that Rosa is dying from ovarian cancer. Rosa’s doctors recommend a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, ⁶ but the Department of Corrections’s price limit on surgery negates payment (“Appropriately Sized Pots”). Without the surgery, Rosa will die. She explains to inmate Morello that “this slow, invisible disappearing into nothing is terrifying” (“It was the Change”). Seemingly depressed, Rosa retreats to sleeping all day, explaining the “chemo makes her tired.” In the season finale (“We have Manners. We’re Polite”), Rosa’s doctor informs her that she has less than six weeks to live. Saddened by her plight, Morello, whose work duty involves driving the prison van, implores Rosa not to die in prison. As Morello gets out of the running van, she nods at the steering wheel and tells Rosa to “go fast,” providing her compassionate release after all.

In these examples, OITNB exposes what, Angela Davis (2005, 41) argues, is the key logic of the PIC—to disappear people in “the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.” By calling attention to the faults of the PIC, especially its treatment of elderly inmates, OITNB indeed works as an activist text. However, the stigma of aging also reiterates banal and clichéd tropes about women and race.

The Golden Girls of Litchfield: Working the System

In a context in which criminality is respected, the Golden Girls’ age erases their dangerous past; knowing this, Red and Vee use the stigma of temporality advantageously. Marjorie Ferguson’s (1990, 218) analysis of female visibility within contemporary media exposes the way older women may “offer portraits of female autonomy, confidence, competence, (and) achievement . . . But the common characteristic of the women . . . is their ability to manipulate.” On OITNB, the trope of women as manipulative is heightened by the construction of aging women who exploit those around them (guards, fellow inmates). By playing into the cultural stigmas surrounding elderly people (i.e., slow-witted and physically inactive), Red and Vee use the assumption of harmlessness to their benefit. Reflecting Goffman’s (1963, 10) claim that “the stigmatized individual is likely to use (her) stigma for ‘secondary gains,’” Red and Vee are aware of their age-induced invisibility and use it to begin trafficking operations at Litchfield.

After Red is forced out of the kitchen and into retirement, she needs a new means of supporting her old smuggling business. When she stumbles upon an abandoned greenhouse, she watches a mouse descend through the floorboards and discovers a drainage tunnel. Using her age to manipulate Litchfield’s Warden, Caputo, Red tells him that he was right to force her retirement: “I’m tired. I’m getting old. It’s a new phase of life. Time to pack it in” (“A Whole Other Hole”). Presenting gardening as simply “a hobby,” something “the old ladies” need, Red misleads Caputo into allowing her to re-open the greenhouse. She is then able to use the greenhouse as the front for her smuggling business while having her sons carry goods through the tunnel. Red’s deft manipulation of stigma reiterates Ferguson’s (1990, 218) point that women on television are constructed as willing to “do anything to get what they want.” This construction of the stigma of temporality as an advantage troublingly suggests that women only get more manipulative and deceptive as they age.

Similar to Red, Vee is constructed as using her age to manipulate those around her. When Vee first meets Red in the hallway of the prison (through flashbacks we learn the two have done time together before), she tells her, “I’m getting too old for this shit. I think this time I’m just gonna keep my head down, read my books, do my time like the good Lord intended” (“Hugs Can be Deceiving”). The idea that she is “too old” for the political machinations of prison survival is an ongoing part of Vee’s manipulation. The episode “Low Self Esteem City” begins in the Hispanic women’s bathroom. With feces coming up through the drains, the women quickly leave and head to “the ghetto” bathroom where the black women shower, leading to a standoff between the two tribes. The current head of the kitchen (and therefore leader of the Hispanic tribe), Gloria, calls Vee into the bathroom. Upon entering, Vee immediately takes on the guise of a meek, older woman, telling Gloria, “I was hoping we could be friends.” Vee refuses to fight, even when Gloria slaps her. Instead, Vee appears frightened and begins crying when she says, “Gloria, I don’t want any trouble with you . . . I’m too old for this shit.” Negating the fact that she leads the black tribe, Vee offers to give the bathroom away, but only for a trade. She tells Gloria that if Gloria asks Caputo for more help in the kitchen, then the “two Spanish girls” in custodial will be transferred, and two of Vee’s girls can be moved into custodial. Getting her entire tribe to custodial provides Vee with the labor force she needs to begin her tobacco and heroin smuggling ring. Long before Gloria realizes she has been duped, Vee’s business is booming. With a profitable business, the black girls become a powerhouse at Litchfield, undermining the once-stable kitchen worker hierarchy.

In the cases of Vee and Red, the stigma of temporality does the opposite of raising awareness about the faults of the PIC. In fact, the women’s depictions not only reiterate stereotypes about women as manipulative and deceitful, they also confirm the oft-held belief that criminals cannot be reformed but rather learn new tricks within the system. Where Red’s smuggling business brings in benign products unavailable through the prison commissary, Vee imports heroin. However, the difference in products highlights an underlying racial difference wherein the white woman is seen as helping the larger community, while the black woman is constructed as harming the community. The death of Vee at the hands of Rosa, as she drives off into her freedom, further indicates the differences between Red and Vee, their importance on the show, and the disparate treatment of elderly black women. Indeed, Red and Vee confirm racist stereotypes as well as degrading perceptions of both elderly women and offenders. In this way, OITNB counteracts its own activist potential.

Conclusion

In July 2015, President Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to visit a federal prison. The president’s visit came just weeks after Columbia University became the first American university to divest from private prison companies, and New York Magazine’s cover story showed the world of Rikers Island “Through the Eyes of the People Who Live and Work There” (Goldstein et al. 2015). While not explicitly connected to OITNB, these events speak to the prison activist cultural moment in which OITNB exists. In season 2, OITNB highlights the contemporary prison system’s failure to handle the issues raised by aging inmates—the fastest growing population in prison. ⁷ In other seasons, viewers are introduced to untreated mental illness, rape, solitary confinement, and the ways the PIC abuses both inmates and guards.

While the content of OITNB oscillates between progressive social issues and archaic representations of women, the format of the show’s release and distribution undoubtedly produces something new. This new form of media, one of original programming by non-traditional television producers released all at once for the purposes of mass consumption, undoubtedly brings something significant to the current mediascape. The control over the temporality of the text creates a pattern of consumption and a mode for critique emblematic of today’s new media. It also offers opportunities for progressive and unconventional methods of analysis. Paskin’s opening claims about binge-watching as a culturally sanctioned activity highlight our culture’s acceptance of consuming mass amounts of television in one sitting. We extend this claim by reframing binge-watching as marathon viewing.

Marathon viewing not only eliminates the stigma of consuming mass amounts of television but also offers a new and productive method of feminist critical analysis, one informed by and reliant on the convergence of today’s mediascape. Marathon viewing allows scholars to make deep connections between multiple texts, to connect patterns of importance, to consider media’s reproduction of power, and to intervene for the purpose of creating social and cultural change. The process of collaborative writing is encouraged and permitted by marathon viewing. While watching and writing, we became resources for each other; as a form of feminist critique, one aimed at interventionist strategies, we interjected our voices throughout the process of analysis. Using this method of collaborative writing while marathon viewing, we were better able to see the ways in which OITNB is both an activist text and a text reliant on conventional tropes of gender and age.

Through marathon viewing, we find OITNB limited in its role as an activist text. The depiction of elderly women on screen is a notable trait of the series and the Golden Girls do offer space to critique the PIC; yet the portrayal of older women is troublingly reliant on pedestrian notions of femininity. OITNB confirms manipulation as intrinsic to femininity and suggests women only get more manipulative as they age. We argue the progressive potential of including elderly women within the series exists; however, it is thwarted, as the show relies on age-old stereotypes of gender.