MJ Corey is Keeping Up With *All* The Kardashian-Adjacent Media Theories
Your new book, Dekonstructing the Kardashians, explores the frameworks that supported the family's rise to fame, and demonstrates how their cultural influence can help us understand how media works now. What are the most important things to understand about the Kardashians’ impact on culture and media?First, they industrialized intimacy. KUWTK convinced an entire generation that access to a family's private life was a normal thing for an audience to expect—and that the family's job was to keep providing it. That's the template that the creator economy has been built on. They normalized what a theorist I admire named Mark Andrejevic called the “work of being watched” as a career path. Second, they proved that in an attention economy, the main thing that kills you is indifference. Outrage works as fine as admiration—sometimes better. Every “Kar-trash-ian” tweet, cancellation attempt, think piece about why we should stop talking about them has extended the discourse. The critics were always the engine. That has consequences beyond the Kardashians. It's the same logic that explains why certain political figures are impossible to diminish through mockery, and why the media environment rewards extremity over nuance. Third, they are the most precise measurement instrument we have for tracking the evolution of new media and its addictive, immersive impact on all of us. Studying them is one of the clearest ways to understand the conditions we're all living inside. I also uncovered in my research the common pattern that most American icons have throughout history—one way or another, they hit on major cultural anxieties around sex, death, race and class. This can tell us something about the forces that draw us in as viewers. What were the most surprising or interesting things you came across while researching the book?The book really is a compilation of incredible discoveries about media and icon history, much of which I did not previously know. There is a lot of discourse online about the Kardashians and cultural appropriation, but I had not before seen any mention of a major Kardashian irony related to the Renee Rogers case, which I came across while deep diving the history of hair discrimination. In 1981, a Black woman named Renee Rogers sued American Airlines for requiring her to wear her hair in a bun rather than braids. She lost—the judge ruled that braids weren't culturally specific to Black women because, in his words, they “had been popularized by a white actress in the film 10.” That actress was Bo Derek. The same Bo Derek Kim compared herself to in 2018 when she wore “Bo Derek braids” on Snapchat.How did you navigate writing a book about people whose brand, fame and impact aren't static? For example, I saw the video you posted recently about the recent Ray J drama, and you noted that you wrote a chapter that referenced Ray J well before this most recent discourse. I'm so curious how you knew when to be done, because there's always going to be another discourse happening with this family.This was a super difficult aspect of writing the book—I knew I had to keep the book grounded in its theory and history roots because otherwise there would just be too much Kardashian material to stuff in. My hope was that I could use enough examples to properly deconstruct the family's apparatus that readers would be able to see how the ideas apply to any ongoing or future antics.
