Dr. Kristin Hoerl will join the University of Illinois Department of Communication to discuss her current book project, which argues that television’s fascination with “strong women characters” paradoxically illuminates its inability to imagine a feminist alternative to contemporary social life under late capitalism.
Via an analysis of television series featuring women antiheroes including The Handmaid’s Tale, Game of Thrones, and Queen of the South, Hoerl explains that the spectacle of racism and violent misogyny grounds public culture’s attachment to the figure of the can-do woman whose agency depends on her own ability to mete out death to others. Engaging literature in rhetoric, feminism, and television studies, Hoerl suggests that television has begun to reckon with the paradoxes of neoliberalism even as it fails to offer developed stories of intersectional feminist agency.
Kristin Hoerl is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Hoerl looks at how popular film and television contribute to public knowledge about social activism responding to white supremacy, patriarchy, and neoliberalism.
Her current research on "impossible women" argues that television programs featuring the struggles of talented female characters promote “sexist realism,” or the assumption that feminist activism is bound to fail. This project, like her other work, invites readers to consider what resources media culture provide for imagining more equitable, feminist, and antiracist futures. Her book The Bad Sixties won the 2018 Best Book award from the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association.
Her work also appears in a variety of journals including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, The Review of Communication, and Communication, Culture, and Critique. She is a past editor of Women's Studies in Communication, a national, quarterly, peer reviewed journal for feminist communication scholarship; and past chair of the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division of the National Communication Association.