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.
Representative Publications
Hoerl, Kristen. The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
Hoerl, Kristen. “Resisting white resilience in the academy.” Invited essay for the forum, "Check Yo' Stuff" Allies: A Forum on the Challenges of Coalition Building in Precarious Times. Women’s Studies in Communication 44, no. 2 (2021): 142-145.
Hoerl, Kristen and Casey Ryan Kelly. “Pants on Fyre: Parasitic masculinity and the Fyre Festival documentaries.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2022): 72-90.
Kristen Hoerl. “The impossible woman and sexist realism on NBC’s Parks and Recreation.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 4 (2021): 373-397.
Johnson, Jordan and Kristen Hoerl. “Suppressing Black Power through Black Panther’s neocolonial allegory,” Spec. issue on Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther. The Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 269-277.
Hoerl, Kristen. “Selective amnesia and racial transcendence in news coverage of President Obama’s inauguration.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 2 (2012); 178-202.
Teaching
Please email Dr. Hoerl for more information about these courses.
Graduate
- COMM 981: Rhetorical Criticism
- COMM 950D: Special Topics: Feminist Temporalities in Communication
- COMM 982: Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics
- COMM 850: Gender and Communication
Undergraduate
- COMM 482: Voices of Dissent and Activism
- COMM 452: Media and Culture