Understanding the Kardashians is understanding America
in conversation with mj corey
Billy Lezra
mj corey is a Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and writer.
She earned graduate degrees in Creative Nonfiction and Counseling Psychology from Columbia University in 2014 and 2016, respectively. She is best known for authoring Kardashian Kolloquium on TikTok and Instagram, where she applies media theory and postmodern frameworks to the Kardashian family. Her Kar-Jenner culture writing has been featured by Refinery29, Paper Magazine, and The New Yorker, among many others. She also maintains a recap column about the family’s reality show with Vogue Magazine, and a personal substack called DeKonstructing the Kardashians. mj has been interviewed by Vulture, NPR, the Daily Dot, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, Nylon, i-D, Polyester Zine, ABC Radio Sydney, and Rolling Stone, and she has spoken about her academic approach to pop culture at Parsons School of Design, George Washington University, and University of Pennsylvania. Her work has also been featured at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to her Kardashian work, she collaborates on a blog called Infinity of Lists with her friend Nimay Ndolo, and a web series called Between Two Salads with her sister, Marie.
mj’s book, DeKonstructing the Kardashians, a work of media theory and cultural analysis, is forthcoming.
How is your book going? How is the writing process?
It’s been a wild ride. You hear writers talk about how writing a book is the hardest thing they’ve ever done, and it really is. You have to move right through it; you can’t go around it. I am learning a lot about myself as a writer as I take on denser research than I’ve ever taken on and try to hold a whole book in my head. But it’s amazing. I almost canned my answer in a very Kardashian way (laughs). But it really is an amazing opportunity. I can only speak in platitudes about it because the truth is it’s so fucking brutal.
I love that you mentioned the “Kardashian platitude”–it makes me think of how, in interviews, they always condense their responses into something with a positive spin.
Yes, they condense it to the ad copy. And just now I caught myself being like, “Well, I shouldn’t center how hard writing the book is because I want to make people excited about the end game, which is a book, but also a product.” One thing that is coming up a lot as I write is the collapse between consuming the Kardashians and the authorship of the Kardashians, and the way I dance on that line. This could be its own book, though.
Right, because as a consumer who is a writer, you’re both observing their narrative strategies and then authoring your narrative strategy about their narrative strategies.
Yes, exactly. And they’re really good authors. What initially drew me to their content was a fascination, as a writer, with their mastery of narrative formulas. They use macro and micro-narratives–there’s the big story of Kim Kardashian and her American dream which serves as an umbrella for mini-episodic narratives. Every little scene has its own arc, and every Instagram story has its own arc. If I reflect on it, what I get really passionate about comes down to narrative.
What is your book’s intended impact?
I want people to walk away with a greater sense of their own tools as media consumers and better historical context for how we ended up in this moment in media. Right now, the book surfs through theory, through analysis, through transferential psychoanalytic processing of what the Kardashians do to me as a viewer. It’s kind of like a mosaic. But my hope is that readers feel seen and heard and validated in whatever inkling they’ve had to consume this content more actively. And it’s a fine line because the question of passive versus active media consumption requires intentionality. I don’t want to encourage people to consume media more voraciously; I want to encourage them to consume it actively. My hope is that this book is rigorous and challenging and shows people at least one way of looking at the Kardashians and validates other people to bring their rigor in how they look at them.
What you are saying speaks to something I really appreciate in your work, which is the way you situate the Kardashians within a broader intertextual discourse and therefore deconstruct the idea that they exist in an isolated vacuum.
I feel like they are really useful prisms and prompts for deeper thought and a more complete understanding of the world. They have literally done, said, performed and appropriated everything under the sun. Somehow they’ve just colonized the human experience in this really vast way–the breadth and depth of it is insane. They can be a prism for how America works, and they can also be a prompt to learn stuff for the sake of it. For example, they feature roller skating in one of their more recent episode intros. This choice can prompt us to talk about the history of roller-skating and the Black community. It can also be a prism for thinking about the fascinating and problematic ways different hobbies have been appropriated and then expanded across the country. Like you said, they don’t exist in a vacuum: understanding the Kardashians is understanding America.
Kristen Warner talks about how feminized media, as in, media that centers women and is consumed by women, is criticized and dismissed in a very gendered way that is absent from the ways we discuss media that centers men. Could you speak to the ways you have encountered this in your own work?
I’ve come across this from time to time: the feeling that reality TV is framed as a girl sport. And there’s so much money in the sports media industry. Sports drive America and American culture, and reality TV really does too. A lot of money flows through it and it’s very influential to culture, but people do make fun of the feminized forum, for sure. And so with my project, in this larger narrative of being a Kardashian analyst, I’ve been a little bit of an underdog with New York media, people online, memers, and some male academics. There have been a few archetypes of people that have diminished my work in enough of a pattern that I couldn’t help but notice. I’ve emailed scholars I want to interview for my book and I’ve gotten some huffy emails back, like, “Oh, I’m intrigued that you think that my history work would even apply to Kim Kardashian.” I’ve gotten some elitist brush-offs. I was at a photoshoot, and someone refused to shake my hand and said, “I hate Kim Kardashian.” There was once a sceney-memer type of party that a friend of mine was reading at. Its organizers made it seem in a DM like I was going to have trouble getting in, and when I arrived, they only identified me as “Kardashian.” There has been a lot of stuff like this. You end up in a position of feeling a little embarrassed and confused and then having to restore your self-confidence. So the crassness that comes up about the family is sometimes directed my way. I think some people feel the freedom to be disrespectful or crappy because it’s Kardashian content and, again, Kim’s social function is to be an hourglass-shaped cultural dart board. Sometimes I also wonder whether some of these memers and New York media types in particular are just mad they didn’t think of the concept themselves. I used to have such a persecution complex about it because it did hurt, and I’d see doors closed in front of me. Now it’s part of my mythology–I just go with it. I analyze the resistance to my presence in these spaces in the same way I analyze the Kardashians, as part of the entire phenomenon.
I also have to acknowledge my forebears here, aka Dr. Meredith Jones, a London-based scholar who founded the Kimposium symposium in 2015 and faced an incredible level of internet backlash. She stands strong in her very brilliant work about all these feminized topics — the Kardashians, beauty, and pop culture. She brings all of that experience into encouraging more young scholars and thinkers to follow their intellectual curiosities, and I’m so grateful for her support and inspired by her positive approach.
For what it’s worth, the girlies in the pop culture and fashion spaces have been the most curious, the most intellectually open, and supportive of what I’m doing. I’ve had fascinating, challenging conversations with people who are fans, not necessarily of the Kardashians, but of reality TV and pop culture. Some of the greatest encouragement and keen understanding of the mission has come from people who are invested in the material. For every person who has taken a shot at my work, there have been many more who have sent so much good energy and kindness my way. I think Kim Kardashian has taken it upon herself to, ironically, transcend the reality TV stigma. But she still uses it, too. She uses the stigma to her advantage, and she has not abandoned reality TV as a medium whilst positioning herself as this Jeff Bezos/Steve Jobs level of potential icon. And her capacity to do so puts people in a pickle when it comes to diminishing the potential of reality TV and pop culture to shape our world. I elaborate on this more in my book.
You’ve talked about the difference between empowerment and liberation and how the Kardashians represent empowerment, but not necessarily liberation. Would you speak to this distinction?
Kim Kardashian represents a certain kind of power-chasing and power-hoarding for women. That kind of power-hoarding is not a good thing. It doesn’t make the world better. She is winning at a man’s game. But…it’s too simplistic to just write it off as evil and not reflect any further. By making such a spectacle out of success at this game, she raises a lot of questions about morality, the condition of women, and what the goals should be for women as a class. I am not on the front line of people wanting to make fun of women for seeking power because we really have so little. And there’s definitely a hierarchy of power where straight white women are at the top because they’re the most approximate to straight white men. And those systems of power need to be deconstructed. Kim poses a dilemma to feminists in the girl boss age who are inclined to disavow her feminism because it has hurt so many of us. But the meaningful liberation that will happen for women is so outside the system that we’re all living in that I think we have to grapple with what Kim is trying to represent and be. It’s not for any of us–it’s for herself. But the fact is, we’ve never seen a woman singularly get this far in this way. If we approach Kim from a feminist lens, which I’m not sure I even always do, we can acknowledge the marvel that a woman got so far, and then try to unpack what it means. Try to understand the spectacle and exploitation that Kim’s success entails. Try to make better sense of the barriers that she didn’t face, the ones she did and overrode. And there’s a fine line into spectacle. We’ll know liberation when we no longer need to wrestle with these questions at all.
I’m really interested in the double-bind of how the Kardashians are the architects, subjects, and objects of harmful standards. And I am also interested in the dissonance they exhibit regarding their role.
Absolutely: the Kardashians can just declare their own reality, which is very postmodern. Everything they’re doing is everything that women are told to do, like being a good mom, performing motherhood in an exceptional way, having hyper-feminine styles and sensibilities and bodies, and never speaking ill of the men in their lives. This matriarchy is very powerful, but it’s still in the image of male expectation. And then the matriarchy is subverted by the power it collects and hordes along the way. But at the end of the day, they’re enacting exactly what we are told to do by a misogynistic patriarchal culture. And, at the same time, they are evading the end-game of the insidious agenda of patriarchy, which is to control women. The fact that people are angry at them reminds us of their influence and their power. Otherwise, there would be nothing to resist. My hope is that it would lead to a meaningful solidarity that could actually lead to liberation. My sadness is that I haven’t really seen that yet, and I don’t expect to in my lifetime.
Would you say more about this?
My writing process has required a lot of vigilance about how and when identity politics factor into the analysis. I try to keep it really tight on a postmodern and media theory frame, particularly because Kim inspires such identity-focused public discourses. I’m more interested in contextualizing Kim’s rise with those discourses than inserting my own ideologies, which I am always in a state of privately questioning and renewing and altering anyway. People who are triggered by my interest in this subject often want to get to the bottom of how I really “feel” about Kim, which makes it even more important to me that I report on the social phenomena without letting my own biases or views in too much. But maybe once the book is out I can loosen up a bit and share more.
In your New Yorker piece you wrote about how the Kardashians seek to become symbols and signs. I’m wondering about the relationship between them wanting to be symbols and what we are talking about right now.
Absolutely. Because the only way to be preserved by history and have a continued impact on future generations, or at least exist as reference, is to become a global corporate icon. And it speaks to Kim’s larger goal to transcend being a human woman and become a woman emblem, which ensures posterity. But it also speaks to the corporatization of the self that we critique in girl-boss feminism, which makes you wonder: what happens when a person becomes a symbol? Is it inherently exploited? Is it corporatized? Do we kill what’s radical about revolutionary leaders when we do this, especially in the context of today, when everything is saturated by capitalism? Is Kim just skipping to the end game, the fate that befalls everybody, while she just chooses to own it? I don’t know. But Kim will be remembered as the token woman at the table of American global symbols, amid Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson and Jeff Bezos. The Kim Kardashian ass is like the McDonald’s Ms Or the Mickey Mouse ears. And she set that up from the beginning, and I think Kanye informed it. He had a really globalized market view of how to turn art or a person into a concept or into a commodity, and now she’s taking it to the finish line.
What you’re saying is making me think of how part of Kim’s self-mythification and self-rendering into symbol and emblem status is this idea that she transcends the human experience of pain.
I completely agree. It makes me think, too, of when Kim was robbed in Paris and Kris Jenner was like, “you might need to go to therapy for PTSD.” And Kim was like, “I’m fine” and acted like it was a crazy thing to suggest therapy after a trauma like that. They intentionally emphasize Kim’s specific willingness and ability to overcome or override psychic pain, and her ability to endure emotional pain. But what they don’t emphasize, because they don’t want to center it too much, is how much pain goes into their plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures. They underplay all their surgeries and the fact that motherhood and labor is pain. They don’t talk about the implicit pain within choosing to subject themselves to methods to actualize their personal and social ideals of womanhood. They don’t talk about the “beauty as pain” ethos that is so imposed upon women, even though their whole industry is the beauty industry, which matriculates all of us into that shit.
Something I really appreciate about your work is the way you speak about the intentional decisions and strategies that inform the way the Kardashians present themselves to the public. I find myself curious about the flip side, about the presence of the unintentional: what are some things you think they’re doing that they’re not at all aware they’re doing?
I think logic would lead us to presume that they’re able to observe us through data because we are engaging with them on screens; there are analytics on any e-commerce or social media phenomenon. So they probably know a lot of our engagement habits, our surfing habits, our consuming habits. In terms of media cycles, I don’t think they always know what is happening on the ground. But in terms of mass culture, I think they pretty much know what to deliver us and feed us. The algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, and the Kardashians are an algorithm at this point. I think the reason they’ve gotten so good at this is because they are very good at reflecting the culture of the time. So, in the early aughts, it was still cute for them to do the baby voice and perform the brattiness and the aspirational all-American shit. But then they transitioned out of that as they realized the hustle culture model worked better, and reflected them better. I think their strategy is to bring some authenticity to the table, learn what works, improvise, and refine the strategy for the next iteration of a season, episode, or campaign. They have a lot of this on lock. I really wonder about the phenomenology of the spectacle, as in, who are you when you’re at this level? They have been performing for so long, and their life has been archived in this polished mathematical way. They’re not living year to year. They’re living in literal seasons. I don’t know who you are once you are fully commodified. They live in a panopticon, and I don’t know what the panopticon at their level does to a person.
Right, like who is the self that they’re not performing? So much of their success is that collapse between the private-facing self and the public-facing self.
Yes. What is it like in their quiet moments? And how often do those quiet moments take place? They are public-facing figures with a private life, but they’ve brought cameras and scrutiny into their private lives. So where is their backstage experience? They must have a lot of trust with one another and know that there won’t be surveillance in their real ass meetings. But also: how do they decide what is a real meeting as opposed to one they can turn into content? And that’s the thing: we don’t have insight into the real backdoor meetings or what it feels like for them in quiet moments. I don’t envy it. I like my more normal life, for sure.
Understanding the Kardashians is understanding America
in conversation with mj corey
Billy Lezra
mj corey is a Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and writer.
She earned graduate degrees in Creative Nonfiction and Counseling Psychology from Columbia University in 2014 and 2016, respectively. She is best known for authoring Kardashian Kolloquium on TikTok and Instagram, where she applies media theory and postmodern frameworks to the Kardashian family. Her Kar-Jenner culture writing has been featured by Refinery29, Paper Magazine, and The New Yorker, among many others. She also maintains a recap column about the family’s reality show with Vogue Magazine, and a personal substack called DeKonstructing the Kardashians. mj has been interviewed by Vulture, NPR, the Daily Dot, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, Nylon, i-D, Polyester Zine, ABC Radio Sydney, and Rolling Stone, and she has spoken about her academic approach to pop culture at Parsons School of Design, George Washington University, and University of Pennsylvania. Her work has also been featured at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to her Kardashian work, she collaborates on a blog called Infinity of Lists with her friend Nimay Ndolo, and a web series called Between Two Salads with her sister, Marie.
mj’s book, DeKonstructing the Kardashians, a work of media theory and cultural analysis, is forthcoming.
How is your book going? How is the writing process?
It’s been a wild ride. You hear writers talk about how writing a book is the hardest thing they’ve ever done, and it really is. You have to move right through it; you can’t go around it. I am learning a lot about myself as a writer as I take on denser research than I’ve ever taken on and try to hold a whole book in my head. But it’s amazing. I almost canned my answer in a very Kardashian way (laughs). But it really is an amazing opportunity. I can only speak in platitudes about it because the truth is it’s so fucking brutal.
I love that you mentioned the “Kardashian platitude”–it makes me think of how, in interviews, they always condense their responses into something with a positive spin.
Yes, they condense it to the ad copy. And just now I caught myself being like, “Well, I shouldn’t center how hard writing the book is because I want to make people excited about the end game, which is a book, but also a product.” One thing that is coming up a lot as I write is the collapse between consuming the Kardashians and the authorship of the Kardashians, and the way I dance on that line. This could be its own book, though.
Right, because as a consumer who is a writer, you’re both observing their narrative strategies and then authoring your narrative strategy about their narrative strategies.
Yes, exactly. And they’re really good authors. What initially drew me to their content was a fascination, as a writer, with their mastery of narrative formulas. They use macro and micro-narratives–there’s the big story of Kim Kardashian and her American dream which serves as an umbrella for mini-episodic narratives. Every little scene has its own arc, and every Instagram story has its own arc. If I reflect on it, what I get really passionate about comes down to narrative.
What is your book’s intended impact?
I want people to walk away with a greater sense of their own tools as media consumers and better historical context for how we ended up in this moment in media. Right now, the book surfs through theory, through analysis, through transferential psychoanalytic processing of what the Kardashians do to me as a viewer. It’s kind of like a mosaic. But my hope is that readers feel seen and heard and validated in whatever inkling they’ve had to consume this content more actively. And it’s a fine line because the question of passive versus active media consumption requires intentionality. I don’t want to encourage people to consume media more voraciously; I want to encourage them to consume it actively. My hope is that this book is rigorous and challenging and shows people at least one way of looking at the Kardashians and validates other people to bring their rigor in how they look at them.
What you are saying speaks to something I really appreciate in your work, which is the way you situate the Kardashians within a broader intertextual discourse and therefore deconstruct the idea that they exist in an isolated vacuum.
I feel like they are really useful prisms and prompts for deeper thought and a more complete understanding of the world. They have literally done, said, performed and appropriated everything under the sun. Somehow they’ve just colonized the human experience in this really vast way–the breadth and depth of it is insane. They can be a prism for how America works, and they can also be a prompt to learn stuff for the sake of it. For example, they feature roller skating in one of their more recent episode intros. This choice can prompt us to talk about the history of roller-skating and the Black community. It can also be a prism for thinking about the fascinating and problematic ways different hobbies have been appropriated and then expanded across the country. Like you said, they don’t exist in a vacuum: understanding the Kardashians is understanding America.
Kristen Warner talks about how feminized media, as in, media that centers women and is consumed by women, is criticized and dismissed in a very gendered way that is absent from the ways we discuss media that centers men. Could you speak to the ways you have encountered this in your own work?
I’ve come across this from time to time: the feeling that reality TV is framed as a girl sport. And there’s so much money in the sports media industry. Sports drive America and American culture, and reality TV really does too. A lot of money flows through it and it’s very influential to culture, but people do make fun of the feminized forum, for sure. And so with my project, in this larger narrative of being a Kardashian analyst, I’ve been a little bit of an underdog with New York media, people online, memers, and some male academics. There have been a few archetypes of people that have diminished my work in enough of a pattern that I couldn’t help but notice. I’ve emailed scholars I want to interview for my book and I’ve gotten some huffy emails back, like, “Oh, I’m intrigued that you think that my history work would even apply to Kim Kardashian.” I’ve gotten some elitist brush-offs. I was at a photoshoot, and someone refused to shake my hand and said, “I hate Kim Kardashian.” There was once a sceney-memer type of party that a friend of mine was reading at. Its organizers made it seem in a DM like I was going to have trouble getting in, and when I arrived, they only identified me as “Kardashian.” There has been a lot of stuff like this. You end up in a position of feeling a little embarrassed and confused and then having to restore your self-confidence. So the crassness that comes up about the family is sometimes directed my way. I think some people feel the freedom to be disrespectful or crappy because it’s Kardashian content and, again, Kim’s social function is to be an hourglass-shaped cultural dart board. Sometimes I also wonder whether some of these memers and New York media types in particular are just mad they didn’t think of the concept themselves. I used to have such a persecution complex about it because it did hurt, and I’d see doors closed in front of me. Now it’s part of my mythology–I just go with it. I analyze the resistance to my presence in these spaces in the same way I analyze the Kardashians, as part of the entire phenomenon.
I also have to acknowledge my forebears here, aka Dr. Meredith Jones, a London-based scholar who founded the Kimposium symposium in 2015 and faced an incredible level of internet backlash. She stands strong in her very brilliant work about all these feminized topics — the Kardashians, beauty, and pop culture. She brings all of that experience into encouraging more young scholars and thinkers to follow their intellectual curiosities, and I’m so grateful for her support and inspired by her positive approach.
For what it’s worth, the girlies in the pop culture and fashion spaces have been the most curious, the most intellectually open, and supportive of what I’m doing. I’ve had fascinating, challenging conversations with people who are fans, not necessarily of the Kardashians, but of reality TV and pop culture. Some of the greatest encouragement and keen understanding of the mission has come from people who are invested in the material. For every person who has taken a shot at my work, there have been many more who have sent so much good energy and kindness my way. I think Kim Kardashian has taken it upon herself to, ironically, transcend the reality TV stigma. But she still uses it, too. She uses the stigma to her advantage, and she has not abandoned reality TV as a medium whilst positioning herself as this Jeff Bezos/Steve Jobs level of potential icon. And her capacity to do so puts people in a pickle when it comes to diminishing the potential of reality TV and pop culture to shape our world. I elaborate on this more in my book.
You’ve talked about the difference between empowerment and liberation and how the Kardashians represent empowerment, but not necessarily liberation. Would you speak to this distinction?
Kim Kardashian represents a certain kind of power-chasing and power-hoarding for women. That kind of power-hoarding is not a good thing. It doesn’t make the world better. She is winning at a man’s game. But…it’s too simplistic to just write it off as evil and not reflect any further. By making such a spectacle out of success at this game, she raises a lot of questions about morality, the condition of women, and what the goals should be for women as a class. I am not on the front line of people wanting to make fun of women for seeking power because we really have so little. And there’s definitely a hierarchy of power where straight white women are at the top because they’re the most approximate to straight white men. And those systems of power need to be deconstructed. Kim poses a dilemma to feminists in the girl boss age who are inclined to disavow her feminism because it has hurt so many of us. But the meaningful liberation that will happen for women is so outside the system that we’re all living in that I think we have to grapple with what Kim is trying to represent and be. It’s not for any of us–it’s for herself. But the fact is, we’ve never seen a woman singularly get this far in this way. If we approach Kim from a feminist lens, which I’m not sure I even always do, we can acknowledge the marvel that a woman got so far, and then try to unpack what it means. Try to understand the spectacle and exploitation that Kim’s success entails. Try to make better sense of the barriers that she didn’t face, the ones she did and overrode. And there’s a fine line into spectacle. We’ll know liberation when we no longer need to wrestle with these questions at all.
I’m really interested in the double-bind of how the Kardashians are the architects, subjects, and objects of harmful standards. And I am also interested in the dissonance they exhibit regarding their role.
Absolutely: the Kardashians can just declare their own reality, which is very postmodern. Everything they’re doing is everything that women are told to do, like being a good mom, performing motherhood in an exceptional way, having hyper-feminine styles and sensibilities and bodies, and never speaking ill of the men in their lives. This matriarchy is very powerful, but it’s still in the image of male expectation. And then the matriarchy is subverted by the power it collects and hordes along the way. But at the end of the day, they’re enacting exactly what we are told to do by a misogynistic patriarchal culture. And, at the same time, they are evading the end-game of the insidious agenda of patriarchy, which is to control women. The fact that people are angry at them reminds us of their influence and their power. Otherwise, there would be nothing to resist. My hope is that it would lead to a meaningful solidarity that could actually lead to liberation. My sadness is that I haven’t really seen that yet, and I don’t expect to in my lifetime.
Would you say more about this?
My writing process has required a lot of vigilance about how and when identity politics factor into the analysis. I try to keep it really tight on a postmodern and media theory frame, particularly because Kim inspires such identity-focused public discourses. I’m more interested in contextualizing Kim’s rise with those discourses than inserting my own ideologies, which I am always in a state of privately questioning and renewing and altering anyway. People who are triggered by my interest in this subject often want to get to the bottom of how I really “feel” about Kim, which makes it even more important to me that I report on the social phenomena without letting my own biases or views in too much. But maybe once the book is out I can loosen up a bit and share more.
In your New Yorker piece you wrote about how the Kardashians seek to become symbols and signs. I’m wondering about the relationship between them wanting to be symbols and what we are talking about right now.
Absolutely. Because the only way to be preserved by history and have a continued impact on future generations, or at least exist as reference, is to become a global corporate icon. And it speaks to Kim’s larger goal to transcend being a human woman and become a woman emblem, which ensures posterity. But it also speaks to the corporatization of the self that we critique in girl-boss feminism, which makes you wonder: what happens when a person becomes a symbol? Is it inherently exploited? Is it corporatized? Do we kill what’s radical about revolutionary leaders when we do this, especially in the context of today, when everything is saturated by capitalism? Is Kim just skipping to the end game, the fate that befalls everybody, while she just chooses to own it? I don’t know. But Kim will be remembered as the token woman at the table of American global symbols, amid Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson and Jeff Bezos. The Kim Kardashian ass is like the McDonald’s Ms Or the Mickey Mouse ears. And she set that up from the beginning, and I think Kanye informed it. He had a really globalized market view of how to turn art or a person into a concept or into a commodity, and now she’s taking it to the finish line.
What you’re saying is making me think of how part of Kim’s self-mythification and self-rendering into symbol and emblem status is this idea that she transcends the human experience of pain.
I completely agree. It makes me think, too, of when Kim was robbed in Paris and Kris Jenner was like, “you might need to go to therapy for PTSD.” And Kim was like, “I’m fine” and acted like it was a crazy thing to suggest therapy after a trauma like that. They intentionally emphasize Kim’s specific willingness and ability to overcome or override psychic pain, and her ability to endure emotional pain. But what they don’t emphasize, because they don’t want to center it too much, is how much pain goes into their plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures. They underplay all their surgeries and the fact that motherhood and labor is pain. They don’t talk about the implicit pain within choosing to subject themselves to methods to actualize their personal and social ideals of womanhood. They don’t talk about the “beauty as pain” ethos that is so imposed upon women, even though their whole industry is the beauty industry, which matriculates all of us into that shit.
Something I really appreciate about your work is the way you speak about the intentional decisions and strategies that inform the way the Kardashians present themselves to the public. I find myself curious about the flip side, about the presence of the unintentional: what are some things you think they’re doing that they’re not at all aware they’re doing?
I think logic would lead us to presume that they’re able to observe us through data because we are engaging with them on screens; there are analytics on any e-commerce or social media phenomenon. So they probably know a lot of our engagement habits, our surfing habits, our consuming habits. In terms of media cycles, I don’t think they always know what is happening on the ground. But in terms of mass culture, I think they pretty much know what to deliver us and feed us. The algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, and the Kardashians are an algorithm at this point. I think the reason they’ve gotten so good at this is because they are very good at reflecting the culture of the time. So, in the early aughts, it was still cute for them to do the baby voice and perform the brattiness and the aspirational all-American shit. But then they transitioned out of that as they realized the hustle culture model worked better, and reflected them better. I think their strategy is to bring some authenticity to the table, learn what works, improvise, and refine the strategy for the next iteration of a season, episode, or campaign. They have a lot of this on lock. I really wonder about the phenomenology of the spectacle, as in, who are you when you’re at this level? They have been performing for so long, and their life has been archived in this polished mathematical way. They’re not living year to year. They’re living in literal seasons. I don’t know who you are once you are fully commodified. They live in a panopticon, and I don’t know what the panopticon at their level does to a person.
Right, like who is the self that they’re not performing? So much of their success is that collapse between the private-facing self and the public-facing self.
Yes. What is it like in their quiet moments? And how often do those quiet moments take place? They are public-facing figures with a private life, but they’ve brought cameras and scrutiny into their private lives. So where is their backstage experience? They must have a lot of trust with one another and know that there won’t be surveillance in their real ass meetings. But also: how do they decide what is a real meeting as opposed to one they can turn into content? And that’s the thing: we don’t have insight into the real backdoor meetings or what it feels like for them in quiet moments. I don’t envy it. I like my more normal life, for sure.