ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I use the analytical vehicle of HBO’s six-season televised series Oz (1997–2003) to explore the thematic concerns of gender and violence that inform this book. Oz documents the lives of inmates and officers at Oswald State Penitentiary (nicknamed ‘Oz’ and renamed a ‘correctional facility’ in season three) somewhere in the USA (the exact location is never disclosed). The show is interesting in many respects, and I will discuss the series in more detail below. Crucial to this book, however, are the explicit and implicit representations of gender and violence – specifically acts of rape – as disciplinary mechanisms within the narrative. In short, the show questions the regulation of human behaviour in more subtle ways than simply representing life in prison as a prison drama, and through my analysis I argue that rape is explicitly located beyond the boundaries of acceptable or appropriate violence, even in Oz, which graphically depicts violence as a pervasive, even constitutive, aspect of the human condition. In this chapter I argue that what we might read as gendered violence in Oz is represented as gendering rather than as gendered a priori and make two related claims: first, that this links to the most recent treatments of rape by international political institutions such as the United Nations; and, second, that Oz was in some respects ground-breaking television in that it refused to normalise rape despite its setting in a spatial zone outside of ‘normal’ society. This has interesting implications for the ways in which audiences are invited to conceptualise rape and its ramifications, and I link through from the micro-domestic (prison life) to macro-international (war-fighting) extra-social zones to argue that much hinges on how rape is conceptualised and the extent to which its performative function is normalised in the context in question.
