Lamentations surrounding the “loss” of 1960s activism leads some to ask: What happened to the social movements of the 1960s? Kristen Hoerl's answer might be that we (the public) are what happened. In other words, Hoerl's project reveals our collective participation in the ongoing processes of “selective amnesia.” Hoerl's book focuses on the ways in which movements are remembered (and forgotten), some forms these memory practices assume in cultural texts, and functions that continue to unfold. Hoerl's focus is on rhetorical texts about protest movements versus focusing on the discourse of these movements.Hoerl's introduction, “Selective Amnesia in Hollywood's Imagined Sixties,” alludes to both her intent and theoretical contribution. Hoerl's primary intent is to reveal how a series of Hollywood texts have coalesced in the public's imaginary. Coalescing occurs through a repeated process of remembering and forgetting. Hollywood represents (and directs) an important layer in such processes. This process of selecting (and deflecting) memories of the turbulent 1960s is a process of framing Hollywood narratives that she calls “selective amnesia.” Hoerl's introduction works to examine and explicate some of the layers contributing to our collective memory of the 1960s as a “bad” decade. The layers that constitute the 1960s come from many cultural corners (film, television, public address, etc.). In order to uncover the rhetorical form(s) that selective amnesia assumes the book offers case studies in each of its subsequent chapters.In the first chapter, Hoerl provides an overview of selective amnesia, contextualizing protests of the 1960s in its various guises. Hoerl provides brief snapshots of Black Power, Third World activism, the New Left, the antiwar movement, counterculture, women's liberation, and GLBTQ+ radicalism. In the second half of the chapter, Hoerl contrasts these snapshots of radicalism with the entertainment industry's depictions of dissent. As an industry, Hollywood has sought to profit through commercialized images of countercultural activities. Hoerl reveals that the form of these commercialized images reflects the “spectacle of dissent” while neglecting the politics informing dissenting groups. Taken together, Hoerl reads such portrayals as Hollywood's invitation to see any social movement as attempting to merely reform the status quo versus protestors desires to change the system. Hoerl traces these inflections and deflections diachronically through the 1980s and 1990s, finding recurring and reinforcing patterns that leave audiences with the “common sense that radical dissent is a phenomenon that belongs in the past” (53). Such sense-making has consequences because popular culture is an important arena that responds to and participates in the political struggles justifying the contemporary era (10).Chapter 2 explains “how the generational conflicts of several fictional families give meaning to the late sixties for eighties-era television and film audiences” (62). Hoerl's explanation of this process of meaning making is accomplished through her analysis of three serial situation comedies (sitcoms): Family Ties, Wonder Years, and thirtysomething. Hoerl joins scholars who argue that situation comedy remains the preferred modality for addressing and understanding the American family since the 1950s. Taken together, Hoerl's analysis of 1980s-era sitcoms reveals these shows “ultimately establish neoliberalism as a common-sense inevitability” (62). Common sense making then is a kind of cultural collusion imbricating Hollywood producers, politicians, and their vast public audiences in “halting nostalgia” for virtues of the pre-1960s past. This concept of halting nostalgia is not fully developed but hints at some political functions of cultural texts like sitcoms.Chapter 3 is where Hoerl outlines the qualities of the archetypal characters (ambivalent activist, macho militants, and good citizen) that can be found in an array of pop-culture texts. In particular, she finds these archetypes in the quintessential nostalgia film Forrest Gump and the NBC miniseries The ‘60s. To accomplish this outlining, she begins by contextualizing the culture wars of the 1990s, a time when religious conservatives blamed the 1960s for the fragmentation of the nuclear family. Within this culture war context, Forrest Gump won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1994. Conservatives, Hoerl observes, weaponized the film by framing fictional 1960s characters as ambivalent, macho, or good. Such frames reflected neoliberalism of the 1990s while simultaneously deflecting (and thus “forgetting”) the motivations of many 1960s protestors.Hoerl contrasts disparate textual visions of Black Power in chapter 4 through an analysis of a variety of cultural texts with a focus on Hollywood films. Film, she argues, “may offer resources for envisioning empowered collective resistance to ongoing instances of police violence” (124). The first half of the chapter explores how Spike Lee's Malcolm X and Mario Van Peeble's Panther offer alternative models for black political agency” (127), whereas the second half of the chapter critically reviews a variety of negative depictions of the Black Panther Party. Although Hoerl focuses on Malcolm X and Panther, she engages a series of other cultural texts. The chapter opens reflecting on Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance, through which the singer provoked memories of Black Power. It proceeds to consider sitcoms such as The Cosby Show. Through her close reading of these pop-cultural texts Hoerl suggests that both positive and negative portrayals of Black Power collude to reveal Hollywood's “ambivalent relationship with U.S. race relations” (125).If Hollywood texts regarding the Black Power movement advanced contrasting visions, chapter 5 explores a consistent and interlocking structured message system in Hollywood's police procedurals connected to and reinforced by mainstream news. Here, Hoerl examines frames through which late 1960s militancy of a variety of movements effectively criminalized the decade. Narrative patterns in police procedurals such as Law and Order repeatedly framed all dissent as dangerous. For example, in news accounts of the 1960s she finds that “the selective amnesia constructed by the news accounts . . . invariably exaggerated the criminal behavior of the actual activists who inspired the episodes” (164). The exaggeration of criminality is particularly pronounced in media coverage of women radicals (165).In her conclusion, Hoerl reviews contestations surrounding 1960s memories and some implications. She concludes that Hollywood has, by and large, taught viewers to see the 1960s as “bad” by framing its fictional subjects as immature, ambivalent, or dangerous to the body politic. At the same time, such media depictions largely left protestors’ rationale undeveloped or unexplained. Taken together, the “recurring character portrayals and narrative developments highlight the broader processes by which Hollywood has structured selective amnesia of radical 1960s-era dissent” (188). Hollywood's selective structuring continues into the 2000s, working to ossify public memory by returning to patterned responses. Beyond a critical review, the conclusion suggests that the implications of Hollywood's selective amnesia are numerous. Candidates in the 2016 presidential cycle resurrected symbols of both the “good” 1960s (Bernie Sanders) and the “bad” 1960s (Donald Trump). In addition, contemporary protest groups (including Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movements) continue to experience negative framing muting their potential. Although independent films (such as Chicago 10) offer nuanced portrayals of the “radical” 1960s, such countermemory texts lack the widespread distribution and often celebrate a “decidedly white and masculine image of radical dissent” (197). The book's final page conveys a cautious optimism that countermemories “highlight the emancipatory potential of memory” (198).If Hoerl's conclusion is correct and Hollywood's selective amnesia of 1960s dissent is repeatedly framed in the negative, her project demonstrates that such framing is never complete. The book enters the process of public memory, reframing public memory of the 1960s through its deconstruction of prominent frames. As such, the book is a significant counterbalance to prevailing mediated memories and will be of interest to scholars working in public memory, cultural studies, media studies, and rhetoric.

Abstract Commemorating both the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the subsequent Gay Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Monument projects a quiet, muted homosexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the courageous and violent assertion of homosexual identity that was Stonewall. Our essay examines this strange incongruity, revealing in the process the homosentimental style—a unique rhetorical form that attempts to negotiate the many contradictory motives animating LGBT advocacy. The Gay Liberation Monument’s use of homosentimentality refracts in many directions, simultaneously challenging dehumanizing rhetorics with affective appeals to care and friendship, presenting itself as assimilationist even as it offers coded indices of clone culture, and producing a doubled homosexual body—at once assimilationist and queer. Both the monument and the homosentimental style thus pose a challenge to binary conceptualizations of LGBT rights advocacy that separate assimilationist and queer politics.