DEKONSTRUCTING THE KARDASHIANs - MJ COREY

This ended up taking much longer to read than I had anticipated. I was hoping for something more breezy and maybe a bit unhinged but instead I got a quite long book that really tries to elevate its subject and sort of defend its existence. I had thought I was a Kardashian Kompletist, in that I thought I’d seen all or almost all of the show (tho, I never dived into the X and Y take Z spinoffs from a decade or so ago) since it’s just something that is on all the time and, like Corey, I, even from the beginning, suspected there was something elucidating and modern and how they interact with the media and the world. They are a very new type of thing and they straddle the very end of the traditional media era/social media era which is where I have lived most of my life. But yet this book brought up many, many instances from the show that I don’t remember at all. So maybe I never saw it or maybe it’s one of those things I forgot. While the show does occasionally give you amazing vignettes and scenes (Khloe walking a mime around on a leash like she’s the Judge, Kanye building a hologram of Kim’s dead dad to wish her a happy birthday from beyond the grave and to congratulate her on marrying a genius, Khloe confronting Rob for judging a Kim Kardashian look alike contest, then sleeping with the winner and asking why he hadn’t done that with a Khloe lookalike, that crazy drone shot) it does mostly wash over you and you don’t remember much. Either way, it is clear that Corey knows her shit, she runs a large online Kardashian Konsidering empire. She runs meme pages and gives interviews and runs polls about the family and chats with other superfans. Sadly, her constant references to this was my least favorite part of the book. She would often cite polls she’d run on her site or mention a comment someone made which I did not find useful or interesting or helpful. She was at her best when she’s just using the Kardashians as a jumping off point to discuss something meaty. For instance, there is a great section about Kim’s racial identity. Kim is half Armenian, does that make her YT? Are Armenians closer to the people from  MENA? Kim certainly suggests so some times, other time she seems to be borrowing, or stealing, Black beauty techniques and aesthetics. What is the history of Armenians in the USA and were they considered YT in the past? All of this is addressed quite well and is interesting. Likewise when she discusses beauty labor or other concepts that surround how fame and capitalism interact. To that end, she does at one point quote the scholar Musa al-Gharbi who says, “Although most employees continue to work in the productive economy (at a ratio of 2:1) symbolic industries are approaching the lion’s share of GDP.” Pointing out that more GDP is added from FIRE, Professional business services, information, education services, art despite  more people in manufacturing and labor. Now, I’d love a deeper dive into this, especially since the FIRE part of that is doing a lot of work, but it’s nice to see any discussion of all of economics. Corey is also a little name drop-y. I think she’s trying to compensate for the “low culture” reputation of her subject by constantly bringing up concepts from people like Kant or Hegel or Baudrillard and makes sure to mention them each time and give a brief little bio of those people. I wish she’d just trust her reader. I’m reading a 400 page book about the Kardashians, you don’t have to convince me that they are worth thinking about. I would have trimmed this thing to only the most far-out and speculative parts.