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Politically, the reactionary Cold War environment, ever on the hunt for enemies within, pointed to prison lesbianism as the result of liberals being “soft on perversion, as on communism,” Freedman writes. Postwar popular culture also went into overdrive with sensational accounts of, in the words of magazine, “love-starved girls in reform school.” In the 1950 movie , dangerous older lesbians threatened innocent younger women.
Freedman notes that the two classic academic case studies of lesbians in prison in the mid-1960s avoided mentioning race. There was by then a complete shift in the construction of the dangerous prison lesbian. In the context of “deep-seated cultural anxieties about the instability of white heterosexuality,” new boundaries “appeared to help shore up white, marital heterosexuality.” The white prison lesbian joined the “frigid career woman” and the “” as threats to the status quo.
Lesbians in Prison: The Making of a Threat
Over on Netflix, today will bring more of what one character calls, in the trailer, “like, next level crazy,” at the minimum-security women’s prison. The show is a hit, not the least because of its anomalous realism for television—it is, as Emily Nussbaum “very clear about how much she [Piper, the main character] benefits from her demographic rarity.” And it brings together all types of women who we’re more used to getting as token characters: the crazy-eyed, the lesbians, the transgender, the mean, the delusional, the twisted princesses—locked up together, victims of an unjust world and of themselves.
OITBN has garnered an outpouring of love for its portrayal of a world we think we know more about than we do. Back in the ’80s, Prisoner showed us all that, radically for its time: we got psychotics, tragic social victims, frustrated lesbians, full on lesbians and we saw the spectrum of the justice system—here from a later season, in which an old timer, Birdsworth is unfairly resentenced to prison and realizes she’s not leaving but in a box. The whole prison reels…and it’s followed by a girlfriend-y scene in the baby wing of Cell Block H.
