The UCL Union Debating Society invited me to take part in a debate on 12 December 2016. The motion was This house would celebrate Kim Kardashian as a feminist icon. I chose to defend the motion and here is my argument...
Kim Kardashian could easily be dismissed as yet another woman
whose highly sexualised image has been cynically exploited. But instead, I
would argue, she is a woman who has controlled her own image and used her body
and face to promote herself as a brand on her own terms rather than becoming a
victim of patriarchal society.
Back in the early 20th century the men that
controlled the film industry quickly realised that images of the women who
starred in their products could be used to persuade people to visit their
cinemas. By Hollywood’s golden age, film studios were slick organisations, set
up to fully develop and exploit the young hopefuls that were tied in to
ridiculously binding contracts. In the 1954 version of the film A Star is Born (a film that has been remade three times with
a new Lady Gaga / Bradley Cooper version set to be released in 2018), Judy
Garland is the ingénue who receives a studio makeover. She is given no say in
the transformation process, and is made-over with an archetypal movie-star look.
Her mentor, a fading star played by James Mason, laughs at her and wipes off what
he deems grotesque studio makeup, before designing a new, more natural, makeup
look, for her – the suggestion being that the ‘real woman’ can now shine through.
Kim Kardashian is from a new world of fame. She doesn’t need
a studio she has The Kardashians, her family, her gang, her brand; a loose
grouping of mostly women who support and squabble in equal parts, about divorce,
gender transitions and magazine covers.
Kim Kardashian’s CV is complicated, she isn’t an actress although
she has made films, she isn’t a model although she has appeared on numerous
magazine covers, she isn’t a singer but she has made records… I could go on. Kardashian
rather is a businesswoman, famous for being Kim Kardashian. Her career built on
the unpromising foundations of being a friend of Paris Hilton and appearing in a
sex tape leaked by an ex-boyfriend.
Although known for her Reality TV appearances, it is her
still image that seems to me the most powerful part of her appeal. Still images, historically, are the material that fame is
built upon – they are more controllable and more focussed than a moving image.
The Hollywood studio chiefs knew it and employed numerous in house photographs to
work with their stars, styling them in whatever way they saw fit, to produce
millions of photographs to supply to fan magazines. The films were fleeting – their
images flashed by. The stills lasted. Photos could be cut from the magazines
and kept forever. The same is true today – photos are copied and pasted from
one online site to another. The innumerable photographs of Kardashian are
testament to the enduring power of the still image – we all know the naked butt
shot that ‘broke the internet’. But more
interesting is the selfie, the still image bedrock of social media and a format
that Kardashian is something of an expert in, as Selfish, her 445 page book of selfies, published in a new edition
this year, evidences.
In the book we see Kim in her bra, Kim with Obama, Kim’s
butt, Kim with her family, Kim in her contour makeup pre-blending, Kim, Kim,
Kim, Kim… page after page of her emotion-free, perfected, impenetrable
mask-like face. Her lipstick and hair colour may change but her face doesn’t. ‘How
many pics does it take to get the perfect selfie?’ she asks on page 354 – and
of course we will never know.
Many of the selected pictures deconstruct her image by showing
the people who work, under her direction, on her image. So in amongst the solo
selfies are pictures and captions, in faux-friend LOL style, revealing the
intensive work her favourite makeup artists put into her face and how her stylists
organise and repair her clothes. There is something here, which makes me think
of artist Cindy Sherman and her use of her own body in her photographs –
dressing herself up and down and deconstructing depictions of women from an art
history which has been dominated by images of the female muse made by ‘genius’ male artists.
Laura Mulvey in her 1996 essay Pandora’s Box writes; ‘A mask-like surface enhances the concept of
feminine beauty as an ‘outside’, as artifice and masquerade, which conceals
danger and deception.’ Kardashian embraces the fun of the artifice; she shows
her bare face, her sunburnt face, her smudged makeup swimming-face and her
heavily made-up Halloween face. She refuses to hide the mechanics of the image
and refuses to be shamed. Under a group of naked images, she writes ‘I wasn’t
intending to put these in the book but saw them online, during the i-Cloud
hack. I’m not mad at them. LOL. They are taken with a
blackberry and I don’t have icloud…it’s all a mystery.’ As commentator Aimee Cliff says ‘Society
wants her to quietly accept these violations and be forced out of the public
eye. Instead she has become the most visible person in the world.’ (the
Quietuss, 2015)
One image in the book pictures Kardashian alongside Pat
McGrath, the world’s top makeup artist – a second-generation Jamaican immigrant
brought up by a single mother in Northampton. And throughout the book there is
a rich mix of women from different racial backgrounds. Kardashian herself is of
Armenian descent and she embraces this ethnicity. Her husband and the father of
her children Kanye West is an African American. This complex mixing of races is
part of the KK brand and one reflected by her body shape, which is the
antithesis of the skinny white female who has been an ideal for too many years.
Mid-century Hollywood stars tended to burn out young. Judy Garland
succumbed to the uppers and downers of pills and booze – set on the path, so
myth has it, by a studio that encouraged her to take diet pills to control her
weight. Kardashian has had her own body issues. In a 2013 episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians she
talks to her sister about how the press described her as a ‘whale and a cow’ while
she was pregnant with her first child. With her captive audience of around
three million she, says Aimee
Cliff, gets to ‘take control of the
narrative of her own body’ (the Quietuss, 2015) and
reveal her post
pregnancy ‘hot’ (Kardashian’s word) body.
Janell Hobson in her 2016 essay Celebrity Feminism: More than a Gateway says that ‘Those of us in
the academy have been conditioned to accept complicated academic prose as the
only legitimate discourse’ but, she goes on to say, certain celebrities are
articulating ‘critical issues pertaining to gender and its intersections with
race and class for a mass audience.’ And this I believe is very important to consider.
Kardashian’s control of her own image places her at the
forefront of this celebrity feminism. She may not, as a recent post on her
website states, ‘label herself as a feminist’, but whether she agrees or not
with the label, her image making is part of the celebrity feminist
discourse. If we want to find out why she doesn’t ‘label herself a feminist’ we
have to subscribe to her website at $2.99 a month. Kardashian is, I believe,
being provocative in her denial of her own feminism, provocative is interesting
and being interesting makes money. Some feminists may find her methods
unpalatable, but she is in control and there is no denying the success of her
enterprise.
