Kristen Hoerl, The Impossible Woman: Television, Feminism, and the Future, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2026, 181 pp., $32.95 (paperback).

 

Reviewed by

Florencia Enghel

Jönköping University

 

Kristen Hoerl is Associate Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches rhetoric and public culture. In The Impossible Woman: Television, Feminism, and the Future, her second book, she resorts to rhetorical criticism to explore the ways in which a selection of televisual narratives (produced in the United States but streamed internationally) underscores sexist realism—the argument that patriarchy is inevitable—via a type of female protagonist that she characterizes as an “impossible woman.” Six fictional TV series released between 2009 and 2020 constitute her main sources of data. Paying special attention to the characteristics and the trajectories of their female protagonists, Hoerl analyzes these series’ narratives to explore their potential implications on viewers’ capacity to imagine intersectional gender-just lives.

 

Overall, the book’s goal is to document and call attention to the paradox of how seemingly feminist narratives may offer entertainment to viewers interested in strong female leads while emphasizing the structural limits to feminism. In my reading, Hoerl’s central contribution lies in how she conceptualizes “the impossible woman” by abstracting traits and trends that she observes empirically in her selection of series and female protagonists.

 

From her analysis of Leslie Knope, the protagonist of the comedy Parks and Recreation (p. 25), released by NBC in 2009, we learn that within patriarchal neoliberalism there is no end to how much a working woman will need to strive or to the sexual discrimination and harassment she will have to endure. Leslie’s professional trajectory goes from serving as deputy director of a city’s parks and recreation department to becoming a member of the city’s council. She is white, middle-class, and seemingly talented. On closer inspection, though, the series portrays her as unintelligent, in that she keeps on persevering without grasping the reasons why she cannot but fail every time. What makes her “impossible” is her not understanding that, despite her extraordinary efforts, she will never achieve recognition or get the opportunities she deserves, which are granted instead to the mediocre white men around her. Her tenacity, blind to sexism as it is, allows her to manage crises as they arise, but not to avert them or resolve them in transformative ways. In Hoerl’s analysis, the series’ insistence on her seeking unattainable inclusion within political and governance structures dominated by men not only normalizes sexism but also equates resilience to over-adjusting to persistent injustice.

 

From the analysis of Kimmy Schmidt, the protagonist of the comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (p. 46), released by Netflix in 2015, we learn that, within a misogynist culture, violence and exploitation are unavoidable features of women’s everyday lives. Kimmy was kidnapped as a teenager and kept hostage for 15 years, and the series portrays her efforts to rebuild her life as a survivor. White but poor (unlike Leslie), and morally committed to the well-being of others, she responds cheerfully to degrading situations and remains positive even though her circumstances are bleak. What makes her “impossible” is that no matter how hard she tries to get rid of the perpetrator of her kidnapping, his negative influence on her life persists. Although she does not want to be defined as a victim, she cannot figure out how to stop being one. In Hoerl’s analysis, the narrative’s celebration of the character’s positive disposition in the face of repeated revictimization minimizes the gravity of abuse, derides survivors’ efforts to overcome gendered violence, and equates resilience to suppressing pain.

 

Having started with two examples of comedy series that feature resilient women, Hoerl moves on to analyzing the features and paths of Midge Maisel, the protagonist of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (p. 63), released by Amazon Prime in 2017, and Beth Harmon, the protagonist of The Queen’s Gambit (p. 63), released by Netflix in 2020. Midge and Beth are taken together as examples of how “the impossible woman” features in period drama. While Midge’s talent is humor, Beth’s is strategy. Treated in the series’ narratives as both subjects and objects, these female leads defy male-dominated realms at the expense of being admired by men for their beauty rather than their wits. Success comes at a high cost, in the form of loneliness for Midge and of unmanageable addiction for Beth. All things considered, their impossibility is happiness, which women cannot have if they aim for excellence in their activities.

 

Next, Hoerl diversifies her choice of series genres. From her analysis of Daenerys Targaryen, the protagonist of the fantasy drama Game of Thrones (p. 95), released by HBO in 2011, we learn that being a powerful woman will lead to a violent death rather than to achieving one’s goals. Graphically raped in the series’ pilot episode (a most telling narrative choice, and in my view an objectionable one), Daenerys must deal with sexual violence more than once throughout the storyline. Hoerl considers this character particularly “impossible” in that she cannot recognize the contradiction between her desire for absolute power—which, as the story goes, women cannot have—and her commitment to liberating others from their enslavements, gendered violence included. Given how Daenerys’ story starts, I wished at this point that Hoerl had discussed in more detail the fact that the fate of the fictional female character she investigates was foundationally defined by a misogynist crime committed against her.

 

Finally, Hoerl analyzes Teresa Mendoza, the protagonist of the drug-crime series Queen of the South (p. 117), released by USA Network in 2016. A Latina character with light skin, Teresa personifies a woman who adopts narco violence as a survival strategy. Initially “impossible” in that she manages to stay alive despite drug cartel attempts to annihilate her, it will eventually become impossible for her to succeed as a businesswoman without resorting to violence.

 

While Hoerl’s sample of series and female protagonists is clearly purposive, the fact that she does not make explicit her rationale for choosing these six series over others leaves the reader wondering, particularly when throughout the text she refers to various other series released in recent years with trailblazing women, magical women, or women involved in illicit economies as protagonists. Unpacking the reasons for her choices may have allowed Hoerl to enrich her analysis by more systematically comparing similarities and differences between the characters’ trajectories and their moves, agentic or not, under conditions of impossibility.

 

I would have also welcomed a reflexive discussion of the conjectural quality of certain inferences, especially where Hoerl shifts scales of analysis and extrapolates, from the fates of her choice of impossible female leads, the impossibility of feminism. Not the impossibility of televised feminism, which she convincingly charts with rich detail as a rhetorical absence within North American televisual popular culture in the aftermath of #MeToo, but of feminism at large in the United States beyond the strictures of neoliberalism and whiteness.

 

Explicitly concerned with the challenge of how to imagine a transformative, collective, intersectional feminism, through her analysis Hoerl attributes to recent television series about extraordinarily talented female characters a power to demobilize that audience studies could investigate from the perspective of viewers, and an overall narrative consistency that production studies should look into to unpack who did what and why, at the point of developing the narratives. A study of the series’ reception among audiences in countries other than the United States, where contemporary feminist politics have had differential trajectories, could illuminate how agency that is lacking in the narratives on offer may be put into practice by viewers.

 

Unabashedly focused on the United States, although it features Mexico as a secondary location of concern, The Impossible Woman will be of interest for scholars with a focus on feminist media studies, television studies, and rhetorical criticism. It will also intrigue political economists of media and experts in audience research, and more generally media and communication scholars who have watched any of these series themselves. I was surely moved to reflect on why I had laughed with—not at—The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel when it started, but grew increasingly mad at it as subsequent seasons were released.

 

 

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https://doi.org/10.65476/vd47dr19