Kristen Hoerl – författare

Ongoing interest in the turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how these social conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized portrayals of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl shows how Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the detrimental consequences of the 1960s on traditional American values. During the decade, people collectively raised fundamental questions about the limits of democracy under capitalism. But Hollywood has proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change.Film and television are salient resources of shared understanding for audiences born after the 1960s because movies and television programs are the most accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs, such as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along with Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced images of the ""bad sixties."" These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy.These warped messages contribute to ""selective amnesia,"" a term that stresses how popular media renders radical ideas and political projects null or nonexistent. Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve social justice and equality.

Winner of the 2018 Book Award from the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association.Ongoing interest in the turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how these social conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized portrayals of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl shows how Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the detrimental consequences of the 1960s on traditional American values. During the decade, people collectively raised fundamental questions about the limits of democracy under capitalism. But Hollywood has proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change.Film and television are salient resources of shared understanding for Audiences born after the 1960s because movies and television programs are the most accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs, such as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along with Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced images of the "bad sixties." These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy.These warped messages contribute to "selective amnesia," a term that stresses how popular media renders radical ideas and political projects null or nonexistent. Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve social justice and equality.

Written by experts in the field, Rhetorical Histories of Social Movements in the U.S. provides readers with a rhetorical account of American social movements from the U.S. War for Independence to #BlackLivesMatter.In nine movement-specific chapters, readers explore the history and rhetorical aspects of early U.S. movements, including the War for Independence, abolition, and women's suffrage; labor, socialist, and communist movements; the Civil Rights and Black freedom movements; Latine and immigrant struggles; women's movements; gay rights and queer liberation movements; antiwar and student movements of the 1960s; disability rights and justice movements; and ecological and environmental justice movements. Featuring a uniquely rhetorical focus, the book examines how specific movements have crafted messages, identities, and organizations to exert social influence in response to overweening power.The field of rhetorical studies has lacked a comprehensive, integrated, and distinctly rhetorical history of the movements our students need to know about. This book is designed to address that gapRhetorical Histories of Social Movements in the U.S. is designed to complement A New Rhetoric of Social Movements by Dana L. Cloud. It can also stand alone or supplement any other theoretical social movement text.

Although it may seem like the proliferation of strong women on television is a feminist achievement, a deeper look into their stories tells us otherwise. The Impossible Woman examines a variety of scripted US television series across multiple genres to show how the cultural value of television’s extraordinarily talented female characters often rests upon their ability to endure—but not overcome—sexism. Looking at Parks and Recreation, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Queen’s Gambit, Game of Thrones, and Queen of the South, Hoerl argues that these series contribute to sexist realism, or the cultural assumption that there is no alternative to patriarchy. Situating impossible women’s struggles in the context of contemporary feminist politics, Hoerl explains how the problems facing television’s strongest women illustrate mainstream feminism’s paradoxical dependence upon on cultural misogyny, neoliberal individualism, and racism. The Impossible Woman encourages readers to seek out alternative stories that might help them envision more just feminist futures.