From the creator of the Kardashian Kolloquium comes a new media manifesto for the TikTok age, blending theory and cultural analysis to explain the meteoric rise of the Kardashians and explore what their fame can teach us about the way media functions today.
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.'
Reads less as a biography of one clan than as a study of the culture that elevated it. This makes Dekonstructing the Kardashians particularly compelling: To deconstruct the family, to treat them as a text to be read, as canon to be accepted, is to understand the media moment. The book’s subtitle is, aptly, A New Media Manifesto ... Can be dizzying in its scope ... Remarkably, though, the book’s argument justifies its breadth.
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.
