Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto
If you are the kind of person who is thrilled by the idea of reading theory in order to better understand Kim Kardashian, i.e., someone very much like myself, then rejoice: Dekonstructing the Kardashians is for you ... Corey’s resistance to moralizing helps her to make an even-handed, clear-eyed case for the Kardashians as a phenomenon that is interesting rather than 'good.'
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Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their vast audience ... Yet Dekonstructing the Kardashians is also a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative. It can read like social-media commentary, with disjointed riffing on one subject after another, and familiar critical ideas trotted out repeatedly ... The book seems designed for an online follower of Corey’s, who already knows the details of the Kardashian story and craves exegesis. The lay reader would benefit from a more sustained, linear biography of Kardashianism, but even in the latter half of the book, which proceeds roughly chronologically, the text darts among subjects and eras, often in the span of the same paragraph.
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The author skillfully condenses her years of observation and evaluation as a Kardashian analyst into this obvious labor of love ... Paired with a personal fascination with the Kardashian family’s collective talent for narrative mastery, a postmodern sense of reality, and catchy episodic arcs, Corey cleverly and effectively fuses celebrity scrutiny and deft analysis with the famous family’s personalities and creates a whirlwind of themes, abstract ideas, and some very solid truths about their roles in modern society and their impact on feminism ... An exhaustive and entertaining look into the Kardashian media machine.
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