Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto

by M.J. Corey

From the creator of the highly popular 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

Since 2007, Kim Kardashian and the extended Kardashian family have been mesmerizing—and scandalizing—America. Whether we’ve liked it or not, we’ve been inundated with stories of their social lives, scandals, and reality show shenanigans and have witnessed the subsequent ascent of their multibillion-dollar fashion, beauty, and media empire. But the question why are the Kardashians so famous in the first place? And what does this tell us about the New Media that has delivered them to us?

In Dekonstructing the Kardashians, MJ Corey, creator of the viral social media presence Kardashian Kolloquium, brings us not only the definitive chronicle of the family that’s captivated a nation, but, perhaps more importantly, the story of how media has transformed in the internet age and how it continues to transform us as individuals and as a culture at large. Part media theory, part cultural analysis, Dekonstructing the Kardashians interweaves history from the past 50 years of Western media—from the Old Hollywood studio system to the advent of the 24-hour news cycle to tabloid culture and beyond—with analysis of the cultural influence Kim Kardashian wields over us all and the influences that have shaped her in kind. In so doing, Corey offers proof that the Kardashians are, in fact, the First Family of our image-saturated and deeply divided nation, while also demonstrating how they hold the keys to understanding the schizophrenic, self-referential reality of our current era.

Genres: Nonfiction

464 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2026

Reviews

[Erin]

ARC for review. To be published May 5, 2026.

DNF

This sounded interesting and I tried but it was more like a boring media studies textbook where the same four scholars are quoted over and over again. There were a few interesting tidbits but they were immersed in too much blah.

[sami is losing her mind]

watched a video essay by the author and it was so good it sent me down a rabbit-hole that lead me to their book! looking forward to reading this one.

[Molly Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

read advanced copy from pantheon:

lowkey wtf did I just read…

part of my grad-school /reality tv loving brain found this interesting but the main part felt this was an ambitious, sprawling piece that did not come together cohesively.

as much as I love rereading bits from derrida, lacan, foucault, haraway, deleuze, etc. their theories and ideas were haphazardly placed within the context of the kardashians in a way that felt forced.

and as much as I love a media analysis of the bimbo summit, balenciaga, and beauty standards, the conclusions felt abrupt and not comprehensive (granted, is that even possible with this subject?)

I feel each chapter of this book could’ve been more effective as its own book..

truly unsure how I shall review this…

[Demetri · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Surface Gives Up Its Alibi
MJ Corey’s “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” turns fame, family, spectacle, and synthetic afterlife into a theory of how the self survives as image.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 5th, 2026


“The Archive Mirror” – a solitary figure stands between reflection, storage, and artificial light, distilling “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” into an image of glamour preserved, grief illuminated, and the self made almost too visible to disappear.

The final Kardashian wish in MJ Corey’s “Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto” is not fame. Fame, by the end of this sharp, crowded, lacquered book, looks almost quaint: the launch vehicle, the warm-up act, the step-and-repeat before the ritual underneath.

The colder wish is persistence. The photograph outlives the face. The wound becomes product logic. The family album becomes catalog, proof, property; the catalog becomes platform; the platform begins to resemble an afterlife with camera coverage.

Its mascot is a dead father returned as a hologram. Robert Kardashian Sr. appears as pixels, voice work, choreography, and permission, praising his daughter from inside a birthday spectacle. The scene is tender and appalling, a séance with production values. Of course the Kardashian patriarch comes back as content. Of course grief gets a lighting cue. Of course the blessing is mediated.

That is a large claim to hang on a household famous for making largeness rentable, and Corey knows it. Some readers will arrive already rolling their eyes, not only at Kim, Kris, Kourtney, Khloé, Kendall, Kylie, Kanye, Paris, Marilyn, Jackie, Barbie, and the rest of the flashbulb seating chart, but at the proposal that such names can bear this interpretive freight. “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” does not try to make the family noble before making it readable as an apparatus. Corey’s better move is to keep the tackiness on the evidence table. The vulgarity is not a stain on the evidence; it is the evidence. The dress, the selfie, the contour, the catchphrase, the tabloid humiliation, the luxury tantrum, the apology cycle, the relaunch – these are not distractions from the argument. They are where the argument clocks in.

Corey, creator of Kardashian Kolloquium, is not writing an access biography, a fan brief, or a gossip recap with a bibliography pinned to it like a borrowed brooch. She reads the Kardashians as an attention economy given a surname, and that economy is most revealing when we stop pretending we are not helping it run. We have not merely watched this enterprise; we have financed it with attention. Hatred, defense, envy, mockery, imitation, clicks, memes, backlash, and bored late-night scrolling all enter the ledger. If celebrity is a mirror, the Kardashians are a mirror with ring lighting, affiliate links, and a suspiciously good algorithm.

The structure is not just shelving. Part I builds the genealogy: Marilyn Monroe, Princess Jasmine, the Kennedys, OJ Simpson, the Spice Girls, and Paris Hilton become older ways of manufacturing public attention – aura, fantasy, dynastic polish, racial spectacle, group branding, tabloid punishment, fame as industrial process. Part II applies that kit to the family’s rise, moving from “ARRIVAL (2007–2013)” through “EVERYWOMAN (2013–2020)” to “THE DONDA ERA (2020–2024).” Then the feed takes over the metronome. First Corey traces the conditions that made the Kardashians possible; then she shows the Kardashians becoming one of those conditions.

Ideas drive the book, but objects keep taking over the argument: dresses, apps, braids, closets, bodies, feeds. Corey’s preferred unit of analysis is the picture that starts behaving like an event – Kim wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala, Kim returning again and again to Princess Jasmine, Paris Hilton as heiress prototype and discarded ladder, the Playboy shoot as maternal management theater, the selfie book “Selfish,” Kimoji, “Bo Derek braids,” SKIMS, the private-island birthday during the pandemic, “Barbie,” Robert Kardashian Sr. as a rendered ghost. Corey’s gift is not simply that she knows her Jean Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan, John Berger, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway. It is that she understands why Kim in a dress can be a theoretical pressure point without ceasing to be Kim in a dress.

The chapter on Marilyn gives the book one of its strongest early emblems. Kim’s 2022 Met Gala appearance in Monroe’s “Happy Birthday Mr. President” dress becomes a question of aura, reproduction, bodily discipline, archival ethics, nostalgia, crash-diet spectacle, and outrage arriving with a seating chart. Corey does not settle for the simple scolding question: should Kim have worn the dress? The discomfort remains, as it should. But Corey is more interested in why the event worked so efficiently as culture: why the dress had to be the dress, why a replica would not have done, why everyone instantly knew how to argue about it, why the outrage became part of the performance. Marilyn belonged to one regime of looking; Kim belongs to another. The charge came from forcing one body, one garment, and two eras of spectatorship into the same fragile seam.

That is where Corey is best. Her sentences quicken when an object starts generating pressure. They are layered and associative, often mimicking the scroll without surrendering to it. A passage may move from theorist to scandal to tweet to magazine cover to joke to counterexample, then turn into gender, race, or money with another celebrity arriving in the wrong lesson and the right costume. The diction is fluent in theory and tabloid. Corey can write about semiotics without embalming the sentence; she can write about SKIMS without lowering the analytic ceiling to shapewear height. Her style has the energy of someone opening too many tabs because, maddeningly, the tabs do connect.

The danger is not incoherence; it is associative velocity that sometimes stops testing its own links. “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” is so good at making connections that, at times, it seems too charmed by its own speed. Another borrowed icon, another monetized wound, another campaign, another theorist, another proof that the family is everywhere: the abundance can begin to resemble the saturation Corey is diagnosing. This is not a structural failure. A minimalist book about the Kardashians would be like a silent disco about Wagner. Still, the best cultural criticism does not only demonstrate that everything touches everything else. It tells us which touches leave bruises. Corey usually knows. Occasionally, she lets a glittering adjacency keep its hand on the reader’s shoulder for a few beats too long.

Even so, the book’s most valuable trick is considerable: it turns disposable culture into usable evidence without rinsing off the glitter. Corey does not rescue reality television, tabloid spectacle, plastic-surgery discourse, influencer capitalism, or celebrity merch from their manufactured tackiness. She shows how tackiness became one of contemporary life’s most expensive materials. In that sense, the book belongs somewhere in the loose lineage of “Mythologies” by Roland Barthes and “The Image” by Daniel J. Boorstin, though Corey’s book is faster, gaudier, more platform-saturated, and much more willing to let the mess talk back. Barthes anatomized soap powders, wrestling, toys, striptease, steak, and bourgeois myth; Boorstin gave us the pseudo-event. Corey gives us a household that turns living into pseudo-event: confession, conflict, maternity, sexuality, race, religion, law, grief, and commerce under the same lighting scheme.

The Kardashians are useful to her because they are not pure. They are agents and symptoms, architects and products, women with unusual leverage and beneficiaries of arrangements that have harmed other women, especially women whose beauty, language, hair, bodies, and labor have been borrowed, repackaged, and monetized. Corey is at her sharpest when she refuses to let symbolic remixing excuse aesthetic extraction. Her sections on cultural appropriation matter because they keep the book from turning into a defense brief with citations. Kim’s “Bo Derek braids,” the family’s long romance with Black aesthetics, Kendall’s tequila imagery, and the easy conversion of other people’s cultural codes into Kardashian style are not merely examples of postmodern recombination. They are examples of power deciding that everything can be worn.

That double vision keeps the book honest. A weaker version would indict the Kardashians so completely that it would have nothing left to explain, or defend them so gamely that judgment would become contour. Corey’s more interesting instinct is to show how condemnation itself becomes fuel. Spectator revulsion is not outside Kardashian fame. It is one of its energy sources. Outrage produces fresh visibility; critique becomes engagement; attempted distance extends the field in which the family matters. The Kardashians are not famous despite the hatred. They have become expert at turning revulsion into distribution.

Corey is especially good on the family as cast list, product line, and weather system. The Kardashians are often discussed as individual brands, but the book understands the group as a structure: sisterhood as product category, motherhood as governance, conflict as renewable fuel, reconciliation as finale, difference as market segmentation. The Spice Girls sections help here, not because the comparison is exact, but because both phenomena depend on legible types.

Which one are you? The glamorous one, the sporty one, the maternal one, the messy one, the rich one, the relatable one, the rebellious one who still appears in the group shot? The question is childish, and therefore powerful. Personality becomes packaging; packaging becomes identification; identification becomes sales.

The architecture teaches the reader how to watch. The first part shows how photographs, costumes, scandals, and public women inherit older forms. The second shows what happens when inheritance becomes a live feed. Marilyn had studio manufacture, magazine circulation, physical aura, and the inaccessible body. Paris had paparazzi, inherited wealth, tabloid cruelty, catchphrase performance, and reality-TV vacancy as style. Kim had all of that, plus the internet’s ability to turn the self into a searchable, shareable, editable object. By the time the book reaches TikTok, SKIMS, pandemic luxury, conspiracy discourse, and “Barbie,” the pace has tightened into platform weather. The sections shorten, thicken, pivot, churn. The book does not merely describe acceleration. It makes the reader sit inside a polished version of it.

Eventually, the abundance starts charging interest. Some later sections feel like exquisitely labeled drawers in a closet that has more handbags than walls. The case is never lost, but the reader can feel it managing overflow. The book could have trusted a few of its strongest readings to do more work. A tighter version might have left more silence around its darker implications: children born into surveillance, beauty as compulsive self-editing, grief as rendered artifact, ordinary people invited to imitate luxury while being excluded from its protections. Corey knows these stakes are present. At times, one wishes she would stay with them longer before the next brilliant object clacks down the runway.

Still, it would be unfair to fault a book about Kardashian culture simply for being seduced by abundance. Seduction is part of the archive. The question is whether Corey’s abundance clarifies more than it clutters. Mostly, it does. Her readings do not reduce the Kardashians to a single sin or a single genius. They are not only vain, strategic, lucky, exploitative, exploited, American, digital, female, rich. They are a set of contradictions that learned to make contradiction photogenic.

The book does not need to import relevance as a last-minute brand partner; anyone with a camera roll is already implicated. We live in the aftermath of the Kardashian lesson whether or not we keep up with them. A trip is not fully a trip until it has produced images. A face is not merely a face if it can be filtered, injected, tutorialized, compared, and sold back to the viewer. A complaint is not merely a complaint if it improves the numbers. This is why the Kardashians are not aliens in Corey’s book. They are the showroom. The rest of us are browsing the cheaper floor samples.

Corey’s sentences keep that relevance from curdling into sermon. She is too amused by the machinery to scold, and too alert to the damage to swoon. Her wit has a nimble social intelligence: she lets a Kardashian absurdity remain funny while still extracting the bruise beneath it. The writing is not as austere as “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger, though Berger’s concern with images, desire, glamor, and ownership shadows the project. Corey is more maximalist, more caffeinated, more crowded. Her form is less clean window than mirrored elevator: the doors close, the lights flatter, and suddenly you can see yourself from too many angles.

The final turn lifts the book above clever topicality. In the late archive sections, Corey moves from fame as circulation to fame as preservation. Kim’s closet, the family’s stored objects, birthday recreations, auctioned relics, and possible future Kardashian collections press the book toward a colder question: who gets saved, who gets displayed, who gets to control the story of the body after the body is gone? Then comes Robert Kardashian Sr. as hologram, Kanye’s birthday gift to Kim: the dead father reconstructed to speak, praise, sanction, and return. It is the book’s strangest receipt. The patriarch reappears not as memory alone, but as product, blessing, data, family myth, and technological séance.

That scene changes the meaning of everything before it. The costumes, selfies, brands, wedding specials, legal ambitions, beauty templates, family feuds, and public apologies begin to look like rehearsals for a larger scheme: persistence by reproduction. To be copied is to continue. To be stored is to resist erasure. To be turned into data is to hover, uncannily, between presence and product. The Kardashians, in Corey’s final accounting, are not merely selling the dream of looking better, living richer, working harder, or being envied. They are selling the dream that a self can be made so visible it cannot disappear.

I would place “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” at 87/100, which translates under my rubric to 4/5 Goodreads-compatible stars. It is too crowded to be immaculate: it overstocks its closet, repeats some of its best proofs, and occasionally treats the family as such a useful key that the key seems cut before the lock has been examined. But it is alive to contradiction, not merely alert to references – exacting, funny, strange, overfull, and finally more ghosted by its own archive than its premise first suggests. Corey has written a book that understands the Kardashians not as the end of culture, nor as its secret summit, but as one of the places where the surface gives up its alibi. The surface gleams. The surface lies. The surface remembers. And somewhere inside the glow, a father made of light, script, and permission keeps telling his daughter she has done beautifully.


Early thumbnail studies for “The Archive Mirror,” searching for the quiet balance between figure, mirror, closet-archive, negative space, and the faint pressure of a presence made of light.


The first pencil structure fixes the room’s emotional geometry – one body, one reflective plane, a few archival cues, and enough empty space for the silence to gather.


An anatomical study of the solitary figure, refining posture, shoulder line, stance, and bodily weight so the final image feels human rather than merely fashionable.


A restricted palette study drawn from the cover world of “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” – near-black, greys, blush, mauve, fuchsia, berry, and plum tested for atmosphere and restraint.


A border study exploring the image as framed object, mirror, closet trim, display case, and archive edge – containment as part of the meaning, not decoration.


The first wash begins to soften the drawing into atmosphere, introducing pale stone, muted mauve, and pink-white glow before the room has fully become haunted.


The mirror light, figure, garment, and faint afterimage begin to cohere, showing the moment when the composition shifts from interior scene to mediated memory.

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself."

This book is an interesting blend of cultural analysis and media theory that takes a look at one of the most famous families in the world. It not only asks the question of "why are the Kardashians famous?", but also "what events and people have impacted our culture to make us interested in the Kardashians?" It opens up the conversation into something broader, and touches on subjects that have to do with our overall relationship with pop culture, media, and celebrity. Some people are going to see some of the connections the author makes as a stretch (there's one chapter that makes connections between Disney, the Gulf War, and the way Kim presents her ethnicity that is particularly interesting), which is inevitable in a book that utilizes any sort of analysis/theory. As technical as it gets at times, it still manages to be a fairly accessible read, and I think it would still be enjoyable to the average person who is interested in the Kardashians or pop culture in general.

As someone who has always been fascinated with pop culture and celebrity - and who has a Mass Media degree - I love this kind of deep dive. There's clearly so much that can be discussed when you're talking about the Kardashians, both as a whole and when looking at each individual. Even if you aren't fans of theirs, you have to acknowledge how impressive it is that they've managed to sustain their level of fame for this many years, and be so in tune to what's going to keep them relevant as culture shifts and changes. I think they're all going in such interesting directions in their lives as they grow their families and pursue different careers (Kim getting her law degree being the most notable), and I really wonder how they'll change how they present themselves and imbed themselves in the culture.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Angie Miale · Rating 4 out of 5]

MJ Corey, the author, has a blog about the Kardashians and their influence. This book, while not what I was expecting, was very well researched and authoritative. I think this could be used as a textbook for a university Media Studies class, as it was not really *about* the Kardashians so much as it was about *how we consume* the Kardashians. The book is structured by the characters that Kimberly has "cosplayed" as, which is a substantial list, and how our culture views them- her racial ambiguity as Cleopatra, sometimes as a powerful family as Jackie O- and this is more about Jackie O and Cleopatra as fashion icons, not about themselves. Kim isn't necessarily comparing herself to Princess Jasmine, she is using these characters as Spice Girls as much as Marie Antoinette- with wigs and costumes and all the camp. While the narrative talks about all 6 of the Kar-Jenner kids, this is 95% Kimberly and for good reason.

I am more of a fiction/memoir reader but since I can't bear to look away from the Kardashians, I requested this book and I am grateful to have been gifted it as a Pantheon Partner. It definitely challenged me with a more research academic heavy nature, but I was still very much hooked and intrigued. Particularly behind the actual structure of the book. It isn't a tell all, it is about how a matriarchy didn't reject the patriarchy but they did monetize it. It is undeniable and intriguing as a business and media proposition.

Thank you again to Pantheon for the ARC. Book to be published May 5, 2026

[EJ Foreman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a marketer IRL and have long been facinated by the Kardashian machine. So, when I had a chance to pick up and ARC of this book I was pretty excited to read it. After reading it I toggles between 3 and 4 stars for a handful of reason.

Things I liked:
- the subject matter is fascinating and the viewpoint feels objective
- The writing is smart and well-researched
- I enjoyed all the tie-ins to classic American culture icons as well as the parallels

Things That made it 3 stars for me:
- I was expecting more "manifesto" and marketing perspective
- It is definitely more of a sociology book. Which may be great for some but was mid for me.
- I really wanted more of her insights and more bitable pieces along with the well-researched information

So for me it was a good read but not a great one. If you love sociology and are interested in the Kardashians, you might really enjoy this book.

[Jody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did we all read the same book, or are we really that different?

This is exactly the type of book we love at Obsessed.abc, a no stone unturned deep dive into the rise of the Kardashians through the lens of new media. It reads like a college course in sociology and media theory, unpacking how platforms like Instagram became tools of carefully engineered manipulation.

At its core, it's a catalog of every cultural reference the Kardashians borrowed (or, as some might say, appropriated) tracing how they mastered the fame game by referencing and absorbing until they themselves became the reference.

A true rabbit hole, and exactly the kind of book we're here for.

Thank you to Pantheon Books for the ARC.

[Lexi readingwhilehot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Topic is rich for sociology! Unfortunately this book just was not it. There were way too many attempted connections made to other sociological topics, and they weren’t organized enough to form any kind of argument or “addition” to Kardashian discourse.

Overall the language was highly academic, and so full of jargon that it became inaccessible. It read more like a collection of think pieces that loosely referenced each other. I struggle to know who this book is written for, what it is attempting to add to the pop discourse, and who I would recommend it to.

Thank you net galley for the free ecopy for the honest review

[Traci Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate this book but think it could have been organized differently for clarity of argument. I liked the ways Corey used serious theory and media analysis to talk about the Kardashians. The book is in two parts and part one is bigger constructs and then part two walks through the Kardashians and applies these constructs to their story. I think the parts should have been combined for ease of understanding (both the family and the analysis), also it would have made the book shorter, which would have helped. Corey is smart and the research is there, but the execution needed more guidance (I blame the editor).

[Penelope Bloom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m here for this book and the intellectual exploration of the cultural phenomenon that is the Kardashians. I’ll admit that I am not a huge Kardashian fan (I haven’t even seen all the episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians!) but their influence on society is undeniable and this author gives this phenomenon the care and attention it deserves. I very much respect what the author has done here and think this is a worthwhile read.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Kardashians are no joke. Or are they? MC Corey does a deep dive into the world and cult of all that is Kardashian and the power the family wields. It's truly an amazing read and while you think you might know the story, you don't (and can't). It's fascinating, appalling, compelling and ultimately completely readable. Enjoy!

[Mamou]

IVE NEVER BEEN MORE EXCITED FOR A BOOK !!!!!!!