Orange is the New Black: Popularizing gender and sexual identities

The Netflix series Orange is the New Black (OITNB) was released in 2013, and its seventh season is now in production. It narrates the story of Litchfield Women’s Penitentiary and of its new inmate Piper Chapman. The storytelling goes beyond the main protagonist, presenting a variety of characters and thus a variety of female gender and sexual identities. This paper aims at investigating the series at the level of remediation and translation and explores the importance of these practices as forms of popularization. The first part of the analysis will look at the way in which the original memoir is remediated into the TV series. Secondly, it will focus on the linguistic choices of the original English dialogues and their Italian dubbed and subtitled versions. Lastly, starting from the central role that gender and sexual identities play in the TV series, the investigation will discuss the function of translation as a form of popularization of issues related to the phenomena.