Kristen Hoerl

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

This essay explores three films from 2007, Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, which foreground young womens unplanned pregnancies. These movies depoliticize womens reproduction and motherhood through narratives that rearticulate the meaning of choice. Bypassing the subject of abortion, the womens 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 womens 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.

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

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. Panthers 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 the films veracity as a source of historical information. An analysis of these reviews and reports indicates the challenges counter-memories confront in popular culture.

Monstrous youth in suburbia: disruption and recovery of the American Dream

Although the American Dream myth idealizes youth who grow up in suburbia as culturetypes of imminent success, the Columbine High School shootings demonstrated that all not suburban youth will grow up to succeed. The extensive news media coverage of the tragedy reflects broader anxieties about the declining status of the suburbs in American society. In the wake of the shootings, the news media created a myth of monstrous youth in suburbia that functioned to repair suburbanites’ waning faith in the myth of the American Dream.

Genesis in Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum

This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the “Answers in Genesis” ministrys Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Founded by a

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

27 million grant, the 70,000 square-foot museum appropriates the stylistic and authoritative signifiers of natural history museums, complete with technically proficient hyperreal displays and modern curatorial techniques. In this essay, we argue that the museum provides a culturally authoritative space in which Young Earth Creationists can visually craft the appearance that there is an ongoing scientific controversy over matters long settled in the scientific community (evolution), or what scholars call a disingenuous or manufactured controversy. We analyze the displays and layout as argumentative texts to explain how the museum negotiates its own purported status as a museum with its ideological mission to promulgate biblical literalism. The Creation Museum provides an exemplary case study in how the rhetoric of controversy is used to undermine existing scientific knowledge and legitimize pseudoscientific beliefs. This essay contributes to argumentation studies by explaining how religious fundamentalists simulate the structure of a contentious argument by adopting the material signifiers of expert authority to ground their claims.

Shaved or Saved? Disciplining Women's Bodies

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBIs 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 movies 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.

Organizational Secrecy and the FBI’s COINTELPRO–Black Nationalist Hate Groups Program, 1967-1971

Proponents of sexual liberation and abstinence-until-marriage advocates appear to be on opposing ends of the sociopolitical spectrum; however, both are invested in the regulation of womens vaginas...

The death of activism?: popular memories of 1960s protest

In this article, we explain how secrecy influenced the communication and decision-making processes within COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist Hate Groups, the FBI’s covert program to disrupt left-leaning Black political organizations between 1967 and 1971. Memos exchanged between the FBI Director and field offices reveal how the organization strategized to conceal its identity as the source of anonymous communication. The Bureau developed explicit techniques for managing the content of their messages, the materials used to construct print messages, and the distribution of those messages. The Bureau’s techniques suggest that organizational secrecy involves a high degree of coordination between members, but it may also endanger the organization’s longevity and the public welfare.