Kristen Hoerl

Depoliticizing Pregnancy and the Post-Nuclear Family in Juno, Knocked Up, and Waitress

Kristen Hoerl et al. — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:04:57 PDT

This essay explores three films from 2007, Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, which foreground young women's unplanned pregnancies. These movies depoliticize women's reproduction and motherhood through narratives that rearticulate the meaning of choice. Bypassing the subject of abortion, the women's decisions revolve around their choice of heterosexual partners and investment in romantic relationships. Although they question the viability of the nuclear family for single pregnant women, these films represent new iterations of post-feminism that ultimately restore conservative ideas that valorize pregnancy and motherhood as women's imperatives. We conclude by addressing how these movies present a distorted and short-sighted depiction of the politics of reproductive agency and the challenges that single mothers face.

Representing Byron de la Beckwith in Film and Journalism: Popular Memories of Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers

Kristen Hoerl — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 08:39:49 PDT

On June 12 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was shot to death in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Nine days later, police arrested avowed white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith for Evers's murder.

Remembering and Forgetting Black Power in Mississippi Burning

Kristen Hoerl — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:51:50 PDT

Public Argument as Self-Preservation: A Critique of Argumentation Theory as a Democratic Practice

Kristen Hoerl — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 05:44:24 PDT

The article presents a critical analysis on the argumentation theory of self-preservation as a democratic practice in the U.S. It focuses on public controversy instances following the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001. The democratic deliberation attempts to equalize power relationships structuring argumentative practice through self-risking argument. It presents the distinction between the public sphere and public controversy to prevent the collapse of the public with news media.

Pain and Public Deliberation: Citizens, Victims, Advocates, Activists.

Kristen Hoerl — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 05:44:22 PDT

This paper revisits the limits and possibilities for the ideals of participatory democracy in the contemporary United States by examining news media coverage of the Columbine High School shootings.

Burning Mississippi into Memory: Parker’s Mississippi Burning and the Struggle for Hegemony in Popular Culture

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:56:43 PDT

The rhetoric of objectivity in the documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties and The Weather Underground

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:52:12 PDT

Analyzing the Visual and Discursive Rhetoric of the Creation Museum

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:48:24 PDT

The Post-Nuclear Family and the Depoliticization of Unplanned Pregnancy in Juno, Knocked Up, and Waitress

Kristen Hoerl et al. — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:33:30 PDT

Mario Van Peebles’s Panther and Popular Memories of the Black Panther Party

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:15:40 PDT

The 1995 movie Panther depicted the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as a vibrant but ultimately doomed social movement for racial and economic justice during the late 1960s. Panther’s narrative indicted the white-operated police for perpetuating violence against African-Americans and for undermining movements for black empowerment. As such, this film represented a rare source of filmic counter-memory that challenged hegemonic memories of U.S. race relations. Newspaper reports and reviews of Panther, however, questioned this film’s veracity as a source of historical information. An analysis of these reviews and reports indicates the challenges counter-memories confront in popular culture.

Commemorating the Kent State Tragedy Through Victims’ Trauma in Television News Coverage, 1990 - 2000.

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:07:48 PDT

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State University and killed four students. This essay critically interprets mainstream television journalism that commemorated the shootings in the past eighteen years. Throughout this coverage, predominant framing devices depoliticized the Kent State tragedy by characterizing both former students and guard members as trauma victims. The emphasis on eyewitnesses as victims provided the basis for a therapeutic frame that promoted reconciliation as a rationale for commemorating the shootings. This dominant news frame tacitly advanced a model of commemorative journalism at the expense of articulating political critique, thus deflecting attention from public controversy over how citizens should respond to tragedies that occur when state agencies repress contentious dissent.

Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony through the American Dream in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:07:46 PDT

Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992) presented Malcolm X’s life story using the narrative framework of the American Dream myth central to liberal ideology. Working from Gramsci’s notion of common sense in the process of hegemony, I explain how Lee appealed to this mythic structure underlying American popular culture to give a platform to Malcolm X’s controversial ideas. By adopting a common sense narrative to tell Malcolm X’s life story, this movie functioned as a form of cinematic jujitsu that invited critical consciousness about the contradictions between liberal ideology and the life experiences of racially excluded groups. Other formal devices in Lee’s film incorporated Malcolm X’s rhetoric within the common sense of mainstream politics and connected Malcolm X to more contemporary racial struggles. This analysis suggests that common sense framings of controversial figures may provide a limited space to challenge institutionalized forms of racism within popular culture.

Mississippi’s Social Transformation in Public Memories of the Trial Against Byron de la Beckwith for the Murder of Medgar Evers

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:21:56 PDT

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Journalism coverage of the trial and the 1996 docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi crafted a social values transformation myth that depicted Beckwith as the primary villain of civil rights past and cast his conviction as a sign that racism had been cleansed from Mississippi. Popular media naturalized this myth intertextually though narrative repetition and through symbolic cues that established the film as a source of historic understanding. These cues deflected critical attention from contemporary social conditions that have maintained racial inequity and continue to prompt racially motivated hate crimes.

Burning Mississippi into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia as a Resource for Remembering Civil Rights

Kristen Hoerl — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:11:56 PDT

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBI’s investigation of three murdered civil rights activists in 1964. As critics noted, the film ignored the role of black activists who struggled for racial justice even as it graphically depicted the violence that activists and other blacks faced during the civil rights era. This movie’s selective depiction of events surrounding the activists’ deaths constituted the film as a site of cinematic amnesia, a form of public remembrance that provokes controversy over how events ought to be remembered. An analysis of the film and its ensuing controversy illustrates how provocatively forgetful texts can simultaneously prompt media attention to political activism and deflect attention from contemporary racial injustice.

Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973-2001

Kristen Hoerl et al. — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:39:09 PDT

There were 7 assassination attempts on U.S. presidents between 1973 and 2001. In this article, we critically examine coverage of each attack in The New York Times and The Washington Post, describing how the coverage employs therapeutic discourse frames that position the president as vulnerable and portray the attackers as lonely and demented outsiders. Noticing contradictions in this pattern, we also identify counterframes, including those acknowledging the political motivations of the assassins, the diminished public sphere that is a context for those actions, and the contradictions in a legal system that denies the insanity pleas of those framed so extensively as mentally ill. Political science, psychology, and law enforcement researchers have recognized that assassination attempts are often driven by rational political and economic concerns. Our analysis thus points to the need for further research exploring therapeutic framing techniques of other instances of political violence that may discourage publics from thinking critically about protest, violence, and tragedy in the United States.