Carceral Female Subjectivity and Disability in Orange Is the New Black: A Foucauldian Analysis

Disability or the disabled ‘body’ is not just a concern of the medical domain; it can be linked to the question of identity or challenging the definition of physical identity. Culturally and politically, disability is a cornered or marginalised space against which the ‘able-body’ is represented. The objective of this article is to study the disability representation in incarceration through the screen text Orange Is the New Black, which enables the viewers to peep into the lives of the female prisoners of Litchfield Penitentiary. The much-acclaimed Netflix original series, Orange is the New Black, is adapted from Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir Orange is the New Black: My Years in a Women’s Prison. In Litchfield Penitentiary, we can visualise many female prisoners who suffer from mental illness or mental disabilities, which leads them to commit crimes. From time immemorial, women have been presented as the ‘other/the mutilated men’; similarly, disability is also a deviation from ‘normalcy’. When disability and femininity intersect within the carceral site, the tale becomes more poignant. The female jailbirds are already segregated from society, but if they are suffering from some sort of disability traits, they are meant to be doubly outcasted victims in the enclosed space. This article attempts to focus on disabled characters like Suzanne, Norma, and Lolly and how they are treated by their fellow inmates and prison authorities. Their abled fellow inmates often call them by nicknames (Suzanne as Crazy Eyes, Norma as Mute), which define their disability. Lolly, the helpless paranoid schizophrenic inmate, fails to prove her innocence when she is put to psych in charge of murder. Another section of the prison is the old inmates, who are segregated from the other inmates and are not allowed to participate in the main discourse of the prison, even though they are allotted particular tables to sit in the cafeteria. So, ageing also becomes another form of disability. This article aims to portray the suffering of disabled female prisoners and the varied reactions of their fellow inmates and custodians towards them. For the theoretical framework, I will use theories related to disability studies; Michel Foucault’s notion of discipline and punishment and Hillary Neroni’s idea of biopolitics, where the body is considered as an archive of information which can be accessed through torturing the body.