If
anybody in the world has been keeping up with pop culture news in the
past four years, or fashion, or T.V., or books, or perfume lines, or sex
tapes and Playboy for that matter, (s)he would have heard the name Kim
Kardashian. Designer, actress, model, writer (supposedly), and one-time
song singer, Kim, above all roles, is an opportunistic businesswoman. No
matter how people may judge her (sex tape rise to fame, friend of
stupid socialite Paris Hilton...), they can’t deny the fact that she is
projected to be worth $35 million dollars and that she makes $40
thousand per episode (and there’s 6 seasons, each with about 12
episodes) on her reality T.V. show Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
Her
strategic media life and business moves provide perfect and fascinating
lenses to analyze celebritism, especially the breed of celebritism that
rises, not out of talent, but by basically being famous by being famous. This notion of fame divorced from talent comes originally from
social theorist Daniel Boorstin; he links the separation of the two to
journalism’s graphic revolution, the media’s staging for ‘pseudo events’
to generate publicity. It is exactly this separation that gave space
for Kim to rise. Kim the consumer and commodity sheds light on
capitalism and its cultural influences. Kim the media darling and brand
strategist opens up a window on the world of fan following and
connection in a global digitally-wired age. And finally, Kim, the woman,
exemplifies the confusion and chaos that is 3rd wave feminism: sexed-up
and powerful or sexed-up and victimized? As a micro-study of the
greater cultural phenomenon of celebrity idolatry, this essay will
explore Kim through the lenses of ideology, spectacle, commodity
fetishism, and feminism to try to unpack the rich and complex dimensions
of influence she has had on culture and vice versa. An essential theme
throughout will bethe idea of agency; to what extent has Kim/celebrities
deliberately influenced culture, and to what extent does established
culture drive her/celebrities to behave/be/choose certain routes? And as
a corollary, the confusing ambiguity of 3rd wave feminism: Do Kim’s
actions make her a feminist (sex-positive feminism) or a victim of the
implicit forces of gender inequality? To what extent is she adapting and
navigating the fields of capitalism and gender norms to her advantage
and to what extent is she the victim?
For
one to really understand how Kim came to fame, one has to know a little
bit more about her background. Daughter of Robert Kardashian, defense
lawyer for OJ Simpson, Kim grew up in Beverley Hills amidst the rich and
famous. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar she
admits that she grew up in a mansion and lived lavishly. However, her
parents told all the kids that after 18, they’d be cut off; “if we
wanted this lifestyle, we had to work extra hard to get it. All of our
friends had credit cards and cell phones, but that wasn’t even a
possibility” (Kardashian). Whether that was actually the case or not,
Kim definitely didn’t just feed off her parents’ money and slice of OJ
fame. She became famous through her friendship with socialite Paris
Hilton and the leakage of the infamous sex tape with Ray-J.
What
her upbringing and environment did bring her was an acute awareness of
paparazzi, media, and how celebritism and fame work. She grew up with
famous people around her as well as the L.A. cultural and entertainment
industry milieu. She pitched the idea of a reality T.V. show of her
family to Ryan Seacrest all by herself, an action that shows her
awareness of pop culture trends and what sells in entertainment. In
other words, she knew the power and lucrativeness of a certain type of
reality T.V---her successful show, most viewed in all of E! history, has
been called a modern day Brady Brunch (replete with diva drama,
materialism, and plenty of lavish lifestyle showcasing.)
I
will argue that Kim knew what Guy Debord knew all along (she has never
read him, of course)---that authentic social life has been replaced by
its representation, that social life today is the “decline of being into
having… [and the] sliding
of having into appearing” (Thesis 17). Just the
idea of ‘reality’ television says it all. Kim, and other reality T.V.
stars, all admit that there is more or less a script for how events are
to unfold in reality T.V. Knowledge of this inauthenticity, if we define
‘reality’ in this case to be the genuine lived everyday lives of people
in actual time, is then spectacular performance in which what appears
on T.V. isn’t 100% real to their lives. Reality T.V. time is sped up so that one drama follows another, everything has a cause and effect, and a show comes out 3 months after its production.
Debord went as far as to assert that “the concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a spectacular universe” (thesis 19). This “passive identity with a spectacle supplants genuine activity.”
Although this might seem like an absolutist model with too little room
for subversion, Debord’s idea can be greatly illustrated by the
relationship Kim has with her fans and vice versa. Kim and her family
actively choose to be the spectacle, in which reality for them is
denatured because of performance under the camera; Kim’s fans don’t know
her in real life at all, but as all celebrity idolatry goes, they feel aligned,
loyal, and even emotionally close to her due to her spectacular
performance in virtual reality. The medium of T.V. provides the “passive
identity” that supplants “genuine activity,” like actually spending
real time with someone.
But this kind of “social relationship among people mediated by images” is nothing new (Debord, Thesis 4).
It is part of a greater system of media and digital networking in the
global informational technological age. Kim is a keen manipulator of, and contributor to, her own image-reproduction, as is evident
in the way that she has jumped on possibly every media outlet network
for information distribution. Starting with her fame from T.V. she began
a blog that culls photos of herself from other forms of media
(magazines, paparazzi shots). She jumped on Twitter, created a YouTube
channel for herself and her sisters to share makeup tips, opened up a
Facebook page, graced the covers of countless national (and
international) fashion magazines, appeared on talk show interviews and
even co-wrote a book about her family and fashion life that hit #5 on
the New York Times Bestsellers list for Hardcover Advice and Misc. In
short, again, Kim actively knew how to fan her own f(l)ame, and in an
Althussian sense, accurately recognized the nuances of the media ISA.
ISAs
are the ideological state apparatuses that Louis Althusser argued have
“a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate
observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (154).
Such institutions may include the religious,
educational, political, cultural, and communicative. What Kim has been
working with consciously, subconsciously and unconsciously, are the
communicative and cultural aspects of our contemporary ISAs. ISAs are
pluralistic, in that they further “a certain number of realities” [ibid] all within the greater meshwork of dominant ideology, which for the purposes of this essay, are the cultural
effects of contemporary Capitalism. Kim’s shows, endorsements and
publicized lifestyle furthers consumerism, monogamous family values,
certain ideas of leisure and play, social-ladder climbing, not to
mention the prevalent image of what women should be like or strive for
today. Kim’s limited agency operates within ideology; her lifestyle
exemplifies Althusser’s idea that “ideology is a representation of the
imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence” (157). She subscribes to certain ideologies promulgated by
existing cultural ISAs, and she actively promulgates these ideologies through other cultural and communicative ISAs, thus completing the cycle.
Another insightful lens to analyze Kim through is Feminist theory. Nina Power notes that 3rd
wave Feminism subsumes historical dimensions of feminism under “the
imperative to feel better about oneself, to become a more robust
individual…everything turns out to be ‘feminist’ – shopping,
pole-dancing, even eating chocolate (27). This is exactly the brand of
womanhood Kim embodies and sells. When positive, it’s linked to
‘sex-positive feminism’ and when negative, it’s associated with ‘bimbo
feminism,’ Kim’s brand of womanhood focuses on body perfection, beauty,
and power through career and self-earned money. She has her name in the
market for basically everything Nina Power lists: Kim has created her
own workout DVDs: “Fit into your Jeans by Friday,” has learned to dance
hip-hop burlesque sexy from The Pussycat Dolls creator Robin Antin, has
started fashion lines with Bebe and Sears as well as make-up, perfume,
and jewelry collaborations. She even has a cupcake named after her from
The Famous Cupcakes.
This
combination of successful businesswoman and the brand of womanhood she
endorses are at odds with each other just like the essential questions
plaguing 3rd
wave feminism today. Is posing naked for Playboy sexual liberation?
It’s useless to try to actually answer this question. What may be more
concrete is an
exploration of the direct link between her brand of ‘feminism’ and girl
power with capitalism. As Nina Power notes, there is a similarity
between ‘liberating feminism’ and ‘liberating capitalism.’ They are
interchangeable because so much of what is considered a ‘liberated’
woman today goes hand in hand with consumerism. To be the independent
gal, women should buy certain fashion brands, have her own apartment,
treat herself to certain types of food, have a gym membership…etc. This
is what Nina Power call Feminism ™. Magazines
sell fashion as a woman’s choice, as empowerment, as self-improvement.
Cupcake and chocolate companies sell food as
‘c’mon-you-deserve-it-treats to yourself.” Cosmetic and
cleansing/grooming companies use this ‘treat yourself,’ ‘be the best
that you can be’ motto. This is what Nina Power critiques about
Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism: “if feminism is something you define for yourself, then what’s to stop it being pure egotism, pure naked greed?” (35)
And
egotism is indeed the essence of Brand Kim. Capitalism in our
Neoliberal society requires us to be “[our] own entrepreneurial
capital”; it’s a system that is “desirable for marketing self-interest”
(Shaviro 7). In other words, it is lucrative to be an egomaniac.
Likewise, celebrity idolatry requires both the celebrity herself as well
as her fans to believe that she is more ________ than she is in
reality. Beautiful, talented, etc.;
idolatry requires egotism as an essential celebrity trait--she herself
has to believe that she is worthy of the fame, the cameras, the hype.
Fans, on the other hand, are comfortable in their “unfreedom,” a term
Herbert Marcuse uses to define the seamless and smooth way ideology
shapes our lives. In the advanced capitalist society in which people
identify with commodity, Marcuse argues that people “find their soul in
their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The
very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and
social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced”
(Power). I argue that this anchoring of self to commodity can be
extended to celebritism. The celebrity is a commodity;
much more complicated and influential than any material object. Fans
are anchored to these celebrities because they identify with the
plethora of behaviors, ideas, images, lifestyles and materials they
embody and endorse. Celebritism furthers ideology because it creates the
Marcusean sense of “unfreedom” for both the fans and the celebrity
herself. She has to actively objectify and spectacularize herself while
fans are exposed to yet another dominant ideology-bolstering apparatus.
Finally, despite all the criticism of ideology
by feminists, the question of agency remains. To what extent is Kim
deliberately choosing her moves and being herself? And is celebrity
idolatry a free choice by the fans? Nina Power insightfully and
forgivingly says that we need to “avoid straightforward assertiosn of
blame” (2). Shaviro points out that although contemporary capitalism has
“no state apparatus…it has been able to contrain human freedom ... comprehensively …[and] invisibly [through]... the Neoliberal market”
(6). If this ideology is as invisibly insidious as Shaviro, Debord,
Power, and Althusser illustrate, then how is Kim (or anyone else for
that matter) to gain (or at least feel like they gain) agency in
society?
As Harper’s Bazaar
reporter Laura Brown writes, “Kim is an avatar of American
consumerism.” Kim, of course, knows this role too well: “Once I tweeted,
‘Oh my God, I just tried a Golden Oreo. I’ve never in my life had
something so amazing….Then the Oreo set me crates of them. To my
door…Hmm, I like Bentleys, flat-screen TVs, diamonds too…” (Kardashian).
“We have the glitz and the glam, and people want to live vicariously through it.”
-Kim Kardashian in Harper’s Bazaar
Kim
definitely knows what she is doing and has maximized her limited agency
and opportunities given an ideologically-set society. I’d even argue
that she knows some ideologies are monolithic and almost impossible
change, so as an opportunist, she works within. The more intriguing
question is why so many people seem to want to live vicariously through
her and whether we, as a society, can conceive of alternative lifestyles
worthy of such a fanatical following.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971.
Brown, Laura. “The Kim Kardashian Interview: Cleopatra with a K.”
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. http://www.marxist.org. 1967. Nov.
13 2011. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm.
Shaviro, Steven. “The ‘Bitter Necessity’ of Debt.”
Power, Nina. One Dimensional Woman. UK: O Books, 2009.
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