CONTEXT:
These two screencaps are taken from Netflix's original TV show, "Orange Is the New Black," based on a memoir by the same name. In the top image, extremely religious and murderous inmate Pennsatucky tells a Correctional Officer that the main character, Piper, is engaging in lesbian acts (promiscuous dancing) with another inmate, Alex. Piper dated Alex before being incarcerated. This relationship is reflected in the bottom image, as Alex resents "falling in love with a straight girl" during a fight between the couple.
Course Reading:
Consider, for instance, a television newsmagazine segment about married women who ‘‘discovered,’’ often in their forties, that they were lesbian. The show framed the discussion around the idea that a woman who has sex with men must be heterosexual, while a woman who falls in love with another woman must be lesbian. On this show there seemed to be only these two possibilities. Even though the women interviewed had had active and satisfying sex lives with their husbands and produced and raised families, they knew that they must ‘‘be’’ lesbian the minute they found themselves attracted to a woman. Furthermore, they felt it likely that they must always have been lesbian without knowing it (Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, 9).
Analysis:
While recent television shows have shown an influx of queer main characters (“Orange Is the New Black,” “How to Get Away With Murder,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” to name a few), the sexual orientations of these characters are classified mainly on one side of the gay/straight binary—meaning the characters are referred to (by themselves and the other characters) as being completely and resolutely homosexual. Sometimes, however, the queer character’s actions indicate a sexual orientation that falls somewhere between this binary, such as bisexuality. For example, Piper in “Orange Is the New Black” is involved in a major story arc (spanning season one and some of season two) in which she must choose being in a lesbian relationship with fellow inmate Alex, or in a straight relationship with Larry—and this choice essentially defines and solidifies her sexuality as being either homo- or heterosexual. Not once does any character in the series say the word “bisexual;” in fact, as illustrated in the images, Piper is referred to as a lesbian when dancing seductively with another woman, and as straight when she and Alex fight. This idea that a person must be one thing or the other, instead of falling somewhere in the middle, resonates in Fausto-Sterling’s piece on gender and sexuality. In the excerpt above, Fausto-Sterling describes women who suddenly realized they were attracted to women even after being in sustained relationships with men—and this realization completely deconstructed and restructured their sexual identity. The women felt that “they must ‘be’ lesbian,” and that their attraction to men was completely invalidated by their newly recognized attraction to women. Both the images and the text support the hegemonic idea that a person must be one thing, in this case either attracted to men or to women but not both, in order to be understood and accepted by society. Piper cannot be attracted to both men and women—she must choose either Alex or Larry, a symbolic representation of her deciding her own sexual identity. Furthermore, this choice must be made— in order to further the plot, to resolve storylines, to satisfy the viewers, and to reemphasize the role binaries play in the construction of our identities and our understanding of others’ identities.