Stereotypes In Orange Is The New Black

The definition of a stereotype is “…a fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people.” (Cardwell, 1996). A stereotype is used to simplify our social world. It is used to make meeting new people easier; since it reduces the amount of processing that needs to be done when meeting them (McLeod, 2008). The most common stereotypes that are being used in daily lives are gender and racial stereotypes. Those stereotypes do not only play a big role in our social lives, but they play a major role in advertisements, television shows, and movies. The main aim of mass media is to be universal and suitable for everyone, in order to gather the largest possible audience (Wolska, 2011). Television is, because of this, “a mirror of the society”. However …show more content…
The first season aired on july 11, 2013 and is still going on, the third season just released on Netflix. The show revolves around Piper Chapman, a white women living in New York, who got sentenced to 15 months in a women prison. Piper has been convicted of transporting a great amount of drug money to her former girlfriend, Alex Vause who was in an international cartel. This all happened ten years prior to the start of the series. Pipers got send to a federal prison called Litchfield, which is operated by the “Federal Department of Corrections”. In prison Piper and Alex reunite and they re-examine their relationship and deal with the other prisoners. The show provides backstories of those inmates in form of flashbacks. These flashbacks show significant events of the lives of that particular inmate before she got sentenced into prison. Within the prison there are several groups of races put together. And every group has some outstanding individuals, of which the backstory will be shown. The biggest groups are, of course, the white women and the black