Women in Prison‐Based Drama

Abstract

A substantial number of studies have conceptualized the interaction of gender with carceral spaces. This scholarship has proliferated across the 2000s as the real‐world practice of mass incarceration has made prisons larger and more troubling. Women, including women of color, comprise a significantly smaller prison population than male prisoners; however, these smaller numbers belie the quantity of scholarship about women in prison or the number of media outputs which interpret and often exploit the lives of women behind bars. We approach gender through the lens of popular culture, pointing to the distinctive body of texts interpreting women in prison through theories of gender and aligned with complementary scholarship on race, transgender identity, and masculinity. Scholarship has noted and critiqued the sexploitative potential inherent in films set in prison, especially the “women in prison” cycle and has in turn offered more nuanced impressions of women in prison fulfilling disparate female‐coded activities such breastfeeding mothers, lovers, and wives. Writings on these issues have begun to show a corrective urge and are now allied with serious calls for penal reform that converge with scholarship on race and race‐based bias.