Celebrity Studies

ISSN: 1939-2397 (Print) 1939-2400 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20

Hottentot in the age of reality TV: sexuality, race,

and Kim Kardashian’s visible body

Alexandra Sastre

To cite this article: Alexandra Sastre (2014) Hottentot in the age of reality TV: sexuality,
race, and Kim Kardashian’s visible body, Celebrity Studies, 5:1-2, 123-137, DOI:
10.1080/19392397.2013.810838

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2013.810838

Published online: 25 Aug 2013.

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Celebrity Studies, 2014
Vol. 5, Nos. 1–2, 123–137, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2013.810838

Hottentot in the age of reality TV: sexuality, race, and Kim

Kardashian’s visible body
Alexandra Sastre*

Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street,

Philadelphia PA, 19104, USA
(Received 6 December 2012; accepted 11 February 2013)

Kim Kardashian is an omnipresent figure in today’s entertainment media. The daughter

of O.J. Simpson’s defence attorney Robert Kardashian, she first entered the public eye
in 2007, gaining notoriety with a home-made sex tape. Soon after came a reality-televi-
sion partnership with the E! network that spawned five distinct programmes, and from
there Kardashian took on an ever-expanding range of promotional and licensing oppor-
tunities, building a successful brand. Throughout, media coverage has placed constant
attention on her curvaceous body, locating it as a site where both her ‘realness’ and arti-
ficiality lie. This attention to her body, much of it promulgated by Kardashian herself,
works to consistently flatten the many interplays between race, class and sexuality in
her image in order to best position her as both an accessible and unique commodity in
the marketplace of personality. This paper addresses how the portrayal of Kardashian’s
body is at once complex and contradictory, concurrently reinforcing heteronormative
structures of reproductive, privatised sexuality and historic racial dichotomies position-
ing white bodies as restrained and non-white bodies as overtly sexual, while exploiting
the interstices of these taxonomies for profit.
Keywords: celebrity; ethnicity; race; reality television; visibility; sexuality

In early 2011, reality-television star Kim Kardashian decided to put the various rumours
surrounding the authenticity of her famous figure, particularly those claiming her volup-
tuous rear end was the result of implants, to rest by undergoing an X-ray and showcasing
the footage on her television show. She and her sister Khloe subsequently posted the X-ray
image on the social-media platform Twitter, accompanied with the message ‘[N]othing like
a good old Armenian ass to get your day going!’ (Nessif 2011). Though this statement is
a humorous one, it captures, along with the accompanying picture, some of the myriad
issues at play in the discourse surrounding Kardashian’s famous figure. Firstly, hers was
a body that entered the spotlight before she did, her public and sexual self initially col-
lapsed by her infamous sex tape. Secondly, this body is partially of Armenian descent, a
heritage Kardashian frequently references in a particularly nebulous example of how eth-
nicity is both constructed as fluid and leveraged in the framing of female sexuality. Lastly,
Kardashian’s image is grounded in the purportedly ‘real’ portrayal of her life on reality
television (and in ‘reality porn’ so to speak), putting her in a position of visibility that

*Email: asastre@asc.upenn.edu

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

124 A. Sastre

calls forth compelling questions regarding not only the agency, authorship and intent of
her representation but also the actual ‘reality’ of her body itself.
Kim Kardashian is a ubiquitous figure in today’s entertainment media. The daughter
of O.J. Simpson’s defence attorney Robert Kardashian, she first entered the public eye in
2007, gaining notoriety with an amateur sex tape made with then-boyfriend, R&B singer
Ray J (Mock and Wang 2011) Soon after came a reality-television partnership with the
E! network that spawned five distinct programmes, and from there Kardashian took on
an ever-expanding range of promotional and licensing opportunities, building a successful
brand (Smith 2011). She is perhaps the celebrity most associated with the openness and
excess of the reality-television era, a consistent tabloid presence whose face and figure are
used to sell a range of products. She is lauded by her fans for promoting an alternative
to the ideal of extreme thinness, and vilified by critics who denounce her as superficial
and manipulative of her body for profit1 ; in short, she and her body are consistently talked
about. Therefore, understanding how she operates as a ‘complex sign system’ serves as an
important opportunity to, as Redmond and Holmes assert in their call for engagement with
the representational aspects of celebrity culture, uncover ‘the [ideologies] that [. . .] shape
people’s way of thinking and being’ (Redmond and Holmes 2007, p. 258).
The portrayal of Kardashian’s body imbricates her sexuality, her Armenian heritage
and her visibility on reality television’s platform, and Kardashian herself consistently
flattens the interplay between race, class and sexuality in her image in order to position
herself as both an accessible and unique commodity in the marketplace of personality. This
image of Kardashian’s body, constructed both by Kardashian herself and the media, is
complex and contradictory, concurrently reinforcing heteronormative structures of repro-
ductive, privatised sexuality and a historic racial dichotomy that positions white bodies as
refined and restrained (Bordo 1995, Kipnis 1996) and non-white bodies as overtly sexual
(Negrón-Muntaner 1997), while exploiting the interstices of such taxonomies for profit.
Kardashian’s is a body that requires constant authentication, of its normative sexuality and
racial belonging, its tangible physicality and social signification. This authentication in
turn paradoxically situates Kardashian as both the (necessarily unspoken) agential author
of her own heavily manufactured self, and the ‘real’ figure upon whose flaws her visibility
depends.
Saint and sinner, white and black, controlled and exposed, manufactured and real –
Kardashian operates as all things while necessarily obfuscating the artifice of this balancing
act. The public presentation of her body is constant, and replete with tensions that posi-
tion it as a fruitful locus for discussing contemporary understandings of sex, race, power
and exposure in American media. The confluence of her class, visibility and ethnicity
brings forth key questions: how does the treatment of Kardashian’s public sexual mate-
rials reinforce existing sexual norms prioritising heterosexual, privatised intimacy? How
does Kardashian’s own situating of the relationship between her body and her Armenian
heritage reinforce long-standing and problematic conceptualisations of whiteness as the
(privileged) neutral and blackness as authentically ‘real’? How does Kardashian’s class
positioning affect the discourse on her sexed and raced body? And, given her lucrative
career as a reality-television star, can Kardashian be framed as agential in the construction
and performance of her public self?
In order to address these questions, and to read Kardashian through a critical lens,
I first examined a range of visual and textual materials related to her media presence.
I reviewed the complete first season of Kardashian’s flagship programme Keeping up with
the Kardashians, as well as select episodes from seasons two through six. Additionally
I surveyed several of the Kardashian family’s other programmes on the E! network,
 Celebrity Studies 125

namely Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami, and Kourtney and Kim Take New York, as
well as entertainment coverage of Kardashian from magazines, television and the inter-
net, from the release of her sex tape onwards. I also reviewed Kardashian’s sex tape
(Kim Kardashian Superstar), her December 2007 Playboy spread and her featured episode
on the CW network show H8R. When looking over these varied materials, I sought out
instances in which Kardashian’s body was explicitly addressed by herself and her fam-
ily, placing particular emphasis on discussions of her butt, her sex tape, her sexuality
and her Armenian heritage. As this is largely a theoretically grounded exploration of
how Kardashian’s body operates publically, I have not conducted a systematic discourse
analysis of these materials. Rather, I’ve sought to reflexively engage with the many often
paradoxical treatments of Kardashian’s body in order to better comprehend how they oper-
ate to reinforce and complicate normative Western understandings of sexuality, race and
visibility.

The private ‘Superstar’: performing normative sexuality

In February 2007, Vivid Entertainment, a top pornography studio known not only for its
big-budget productions but also for its popular arsenal of celebrity sex tapes, announced
it was releasing Kim Kardashian Superstar. Immediately denouncing the tape as ‘despica-
ble and malicious’, Kardashian sued Vivid, yet promptly (and quietly) dropped the suit in
exchange for a share of the tape’s profits (Adams 2007). Shortly after the tape’s release,
Kardashian’s visibility increased exponentially, though at the time there was little else
known of her besides the pornographic video. Having worked in the fashion industry as
a personal stylist yet remaining largely out of the public eye, Kardashian’s public per-
sona and sexual persona were initially collapsed, with the home-made tape serving as the
public’s first official introduction to an otherwise obscure socialite. This tape, and its sub-
sequent treatment by Kardashian, frames the beginnings of a public identity that would
consistently echo the themes introduced in Superstar: the performance of an authentic self,
the valence of heteronormative, privatised sexuality, and the objectification of an exotically
coded curvaceous body granted access to both the privileged sphere of whiteness and the
‘authentic’ sphere of blackness.
Linda Williams (1989, p. 30) situates ‘the very impetus for the invention of cinema
[as] precisely [the ability] to register the previously invisible hard-core truth of bodies and
pleasures in a direct and unmediated fashion’. Kim Kardashian Superstar, as the home-
made tape was christened by Vivid, serves as an interesting amalgam of this desire not only
to know, but also to tell. The tape is 39 minutes in length, though much of it is not ‘hardcore
sex’, as Vivid’s website implies, but instead Kardashian and her partner, singer Ray J,
preening before the camera, often addressing the ‘viewer’ directly. Early on in the video,
Kardashian is seen meticulously applying her heavy eye make-up, coating her lashes with
mascara and touching up the thick black shadow lining her eyes. As she moves away from
the bathroom mirror and towards the bedroom, the camera follows her and she addresses it
head on, exclaiming: ‘[T]o all of you out there who think my boobs are fake, they’re real!’
This statement is seemingly not directed at Ray J, despite his presence behind the
camera. Though later statements from Kardashian claim that the tape was made to be pri-
vate, and that she and Ray J did not ‘think that it would get out’ (Keeping Up With the
Kardashians 2007a) her bold address seems to indicate an existing self-consciousness as
a public figure, and a recognition that the camera, even when purportedly wielded within
the private sphere, serves as a vehicle through which her public self can be constructed
and her physical presence authenticated. Kim Kardashian Superstar presents Kardashian
126 A. Sastre

readily cultivating what Graeme Turner (2006, p. 157) refers to as a ‘motivated perfor-
mance of ordinariness or authenticity’ and it is this consciousness that resonates throughout
the subsequent years Kardashian has spent in front of it.
On that tape, however, it is Kardashian’s corporeality that takes centre stage. As she
emerges from the bathroom and verbalises the realness of her form, she also puts it slowly
and gingerly on display. The plush white robe she is wrapped in is playfully tossed off
one shoulder to reveal her silhouette, on to which the camera zooms. As she adjusts her
underwear, the camera zooms further, focusing on the rounded curve of her hip, signalling
the central role Kardashian’s lower half will play in this and future productions. We see
her performing fellatio on Ray J, and lounging on the bed with the stillness of a pin-up,
recalling Marilyn Monroe’s iconic Playboy spread. Mostly, however, we see her butt: Ray
J plays with it, zooms in on it, and frequently films himself entering her from behind,
the lens revelling in its prominent flesh. Throughout, Kardashian is verbally animated but
physically demure, moving little, sexually passive to Ray J’s voracity. The sex is not par-
ticularly risqué, unique or shocking, and even when talking dirty Kardashian consistently
refers to Ray as ‘baby’, as if to reinforce the bond of a committed and monogamous rela-
tionship within which she later claimed this tape was made. Their relationship is portrayed
as intimate to the point of being mundane, as scenes of the couple vacationing and playing
with the camera frame the actual sex scenes. While never fully situating the couple within
the domestic sphere, Kardashian’s display emphasises the centrality of heteronormativity
to her public/private persona. As she applies the aforementioned make-up, Ray J questions
whom she is getting ready for. ‘You, silly,’ she replies. While the immediate object of her
intimacies is Ray J, Kardashian’s performance, of a carefully orchestrated, monogamous,
passive yet exotic sex kitten, belies the pervasive, sometimes polarising media presence
she would soon become.

Recalibrating deviance: public confession on the Tyra show

Keeping Up with the Kardashians debuted in December of 2007 on the E! entertainment
network, quickly becoming the channel’s highest-rated programme. The show features the
Kardashian-Jenner family, who, with six children, refer to themselves as a ‘modern day
“Brady bunch”’ (Keeping Up With the Kardashians 2011b). The opening five minutes of
the pilot episode, aptly titled ‘I’m Watching You’, tellingly set up the key themes of the
show: the clan as the modern American family and Kim as the star, her butt and body the
objects of the camera’s lingering gaze. The opening shot features their home, relatively
modest by Hollywood standards. It is fringed by a sprawling porch from which hangs a
billowing American flag upon which the camera dutifully lingers. Yet in contrast to this
portrait of a quintessential American family, the subsequent shot is of Kim in the kitchen,
reaching into the fridge. As she does so, her nearby mother and sister discuss how she
should not be eating due to the photo shoot she has scheduled the following day. During
this brief discussion, the camera zooms in on Kardashian’s butt as her mother stands behind
her and playfully whispers, ‘I think she has a little junk in the trunk.’
Though this moment is presented as comical, it highlights the importance the show will
place on Kardashian’s body as both the source of her family’s income and the marker of her
ethnic heritage. On the pilot episode, Kardashian’s butt serves to very quickly introduce a
conversation about her sex tape. At the time, Kim is slated to appear on the daytime talk
show The Tyra Banks Show to discuss this very subject, an appearance presented as the first
of its kind for her, a sort of official public introduction to hopefully supersede (or capitalise
on) the notoriety of her sex tape. In preparation for this appearance, Kardashian discusses
 Celebrity Studies 127

her planned responses with her mother and sisters, though not until after she has firmly
stated the appropriate and expected narrative of shame: ‘I don’t wanna talk about it.’
Foucault (1990, p. 25) situates the centrality of discourse in the shaping of sexuality
in both the public and private sphere. It is through discourse and its counterpoint, silence,
that sex becomes a paradoxically central and negated element of Western identity. Sex is
thus ‘[regulated] through useful and public discourses’, and the ways in which it is both
discussed and enacted are policed. Foucault identifies ‘tell everything’ as the mantra of
Catholic confession, a process that purports to alleviate the sinful burden of ‘abhorrent’
sexual behaviour by the very act of discursively revelling in it. Kardashian’s Tyra appear-
ance is utilised for a similar purpose, framed as a cathartic release of the negative stigma
associated with the tape and allowing for the aspiring star to redeem herself in the public
eye.
Kardashian’s practice narrative in the comfort of her parents’ conservative home,
before her family and the unacknowledged camera, reinforces both her monogamous, het-
eronormative sexuality and what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998, p. 559) iden-
tify as the privatisation of intimacy. In a subdued tone, Kardashian states that:

[The tape] was [made] with my boyfriend of three years that I was very much in love with, and
whatever we did in our private time was our private time, and never once did we think that it
would get out

Operating as a confession, the statement serves to recalibrate the aberration of her public
sexual performance. To Tyra Banks, Kardashian not only repeats the statement but also
places even greater emphasis on her remorse and recognition of the supposedly negative
character of her actions. Identifying her public sex act as deviant, Kardashian contrasts it
rather explicitly with family values, positioning her own experience and choices as lessons
in what not to do if one wants to ‘[belong] to society in a deep and normal way’ (Berlant
and Warner 1998, p. 554): ‘I made it, I need to take responsibility for what I’ve done. I have
little sisters, I need to teach them what not to do’ (Getting to Know You 2011b). Kardashian
thus pays her dues, transforming her deviant behaviour into an opportunity to reassert
sexual and social norms. Yet she also, despite her protestation, continues to talk about the
tape, and to exploit opportunities, such as the Tyra show, that without the tape would likely
not have been available to her. What she cannot and does not do, of course, is acknowledge
this reality, the one that requires her both to speak and to speak of no longer speaking, that
repeats, reminds and reinforces her literal physical exposure through new and ‘corrective’
forms of exposure that themselves lend her the visibility necessary to build a tremendously
lucrative career. Kardashian ends the segment with the proclamation, ‘Good, I’m done,
and now I don’t have to talk about it ever again’, and vows to not ‘let people drag it on and
be reminded of a negative thing that happened in my life’. ‘Hopefully,’ she says, ‘I will
replace it with positive things.’ She follows through on the implicit situating of ‘positive’
as normative, regulated sexual practice by posing for the December 2007 issue of Playboy
magazine, using the exposure as an opportunity to perform a heavily mediated version of
her sexual self, legitimised through a frame of classed and raced normativity that continues
to shape her growing personal brand.

Clutching pearls: signalling class in Playboy

In the fourth episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians’ first season, Kim Kardashian is
shown, alongside her family, first contemplating an offer from Playboy magazine and then
128 A. Sastre

ultimately posing as their December 2007 centrefold. In considering the offer, Kardashian
is initially portrayed as hesitant to move forward with the shoot, concerned she will be
known for little more than exposing her body. She indicates that further nudity could
threaten her carefully calibrated public persona, disturbing her intended redemption from
the stigma of her sex tape. She states, ‘[E]ver since the sex-tape scandal, I have to be really
careful in how I’m perceived’, revealing an awareness of the importance of maintaining
her image within socio-sexual norms. However, throughout the episode, Kardashian ratio-
nalises this opportunity as positive for her image by linking it to symbolic markers of
upper-class identity, going so far as to incorporate visual markers of wealth in her picto-
rial. As she states jokingly to her sisters upon making her decision, ‘I’m doing it with class,
’cause I got a big ass’ (Keeping Up With the Kardashians 2007a).
In negotiating her Playboy spread, Kardashian legitimises the decision to pose by refer-
encing the markers of upper-class identity the shoot will incorporate. Kardashian initially
shoots a non-nude pictorial, stressing repeatedly her discomfort with nudity and desire to
not ‘show anything’, despite the urgings of the Playboy photographer that she disrobe fully.
Kardashian is in fact so adamant that she will not pose nude that she, when feeling forced
to disrobe, threatens to ‘write [Playboy] a cheque for double the money and say “fuck you”
and walk out of here’ (Keeping Up With the Kardashians 2007b). With this statement,
Kardashian reinforces her class positioning, implying that she does not need the money,
despite her mother’s emphasis on the lucrative nature of the offer. Playboy is thus situated
as a chance for Kardashian to gain further exposure and visibility rather than income, an
opportunity that is only worthwhile if her class status is not threatened.
After the initial shoot’s completion, Kardashian is again contacted by Playboy to set
up a meeting with the magazine’s founder, Hugh Hefner. She is told directly by Hefner
that the magazine wants a fully nude pictorial, but that she should not be concerned, for
her naked body will be shown only ‘discreetly and in very good taste. [. . .] [I]t will not be
explicit; that is what sets Playboy apart from these other magazines, [we are] always classy’
(Keeping Up With the Kardashians 2007b). Hefner thus both legitimises Kardashian’s
proposed nudity within an elitist framework, and reinforces Playboy’s reputation as
the ‘classiest’ version of contemporary pornography. Laura Kipnis (1996, p. 130) con-
trasts Playboy with other pornographic publications on the market, such as Hustler and
Penthouse, by situating the former as a space for ‘upwardly mobile professional-class fan-
tasies’. Unlike the more graphic Hustler pictorials showcasing the naked body, particularly
the lower half, up close, Playboy sells an ‘airbrushed, top-heavy fantasy body’ (Kipnis
1996, p. 131). In this version of the pornographic imaginary, the bodies are streamlined,
discreet and, comparatively, elite; most importantly, however, these are bodies on an upward
trajectory, belonging to women who, according to the mythology surrounding the pub-
lication, will supposedly come into a life of glamour and celebrity through the coveted
exposure awarded to them by the magazine.
Kardashian was not the first burgeoning celebrity to help the launch of her career by
posing for the magazine. Not only did a young Marilyn Monroe serve as Playboy’s first
centrefold, but Anna Nicole Smith similarly utilised the magazine to promote her new
modelling career. Smith, who came from a working-class background and was employed
as a stripper before gaining fame as a model for Guess jeans, is a notable example of how
class is performed on the pages of Playboy. Her 1992 pictorial was aided by the addi-
tion of several superficial symbols of wealth: ‘formal gown, gloves, pearls and a Victorian
chair and opera glasses’ (Brown 2005, p. 79), linking her Rubenesque form and proto-
typical white, blonde beauty not with her ‘white trash’ background but with a fantasy of
status and luxury. Following Smith and Monroe, whom Hefner references when attempting
 Celebrity Studies 129

to allay Kardashian’s discomfort with nudity, Kardashian ultimately agrees to the more
exposed re-shoot. Reinforcing her agency in choosing to appear in the publication (and
perhaps reinforcing the difference between this instance of nudity and the ‘leaked’ sex
tape), Kardashian states that she ‘[came] up with this idea that [she’s] totally comfortable
being nude if [she’s] draped in diamonds and pearls’ (Birthday Suit 2007b). The picto-
rial then becomes one in which, unlike her original, more modest, lingerie shoot, she is
featured posing in strands of pearls, black silk and white furs. In all of the photographs,
she is given what Kipnis (1996) calls the ‘Playboy treatment’: heavy airbrushing and dim,
seductive lighting. Her breasts and butt are visible, but never fully turned to the camera,
always, despite her full nudity, more suggestive than explicit.
Class markers are thus utilised by Kardashian to sanitise this instance of nudity, sim-
ilarly to her earlier deployment of heteronormative understandings of public and private
sexuality to help ‘atone’ for her sex tape. Yet what is also notable about the Playboy shoot
is how the actual positioning of her body in the photographs contrasts with the way her
body is featured in her sex tape. While the home-movie camera lingered extensively on
her butt, the Playboy photos place greater emphasis on her breasts. Kardashian is shown
fondling them, and, whether covered in strands of pearls or outlined by white fur, they
are highlighted as the object of most of the magazine’s many shots. Here we see the ‘air-
brushed, top-heavy fantasy of Playboy’ (Kipnis 1996, p. 131) that Kipnis contrasts with
Hustler: while the elite-coded Playboy highlights the upper body, the raunchier, lower-
class-coded Hustler engages with the less romanticised lower half. This polarity echoes
the long-standing Western binary between not only rich and poor, but also white and black,
connoting the central racial hierarchy that Kardashian herself plays with as she continues
to shape her public image. In this binary, the top half of the white body is romanticised,
rendering even sexual objectification unthreatening to the white woman’s status as a full
subject (Redmond 2007). The bottom-half of the non-white body is, in turn, fetishised in
such a way as to reify the non-white woman’s status as an object. Writes Negrón-Mutaner
(1997, p. 198) ‘a big [. . .] rear end is an invitation to pleasures construed as illicit by
puritan ideologies, heteronormativity and the medical establishment’, a space on to which
to project, and the flesh with which to enact, the hedonism a white female body is con-
sistently protected from. The treatment by Kardashian of her sexual body then echoes the
treatment of her raced body; with her sex tape and Playboy spread leveraged as opportuni-
ties to both validate the status quo and reinforce her ability to play within and outside its
boundaries, Kardashian’s Armenian heritage and curvaceous yet diligently regulated body
are also constructed as opportunities to navigate the space between black and white.

Regulated whiteness: working to ‘Fit in Your Jeans by Friday’

Kardashian’s curvaceous body is thus not just publically sexualised but publically raced,
most emphatically by Kardashian herself, as she strategically embodies both the trope of
the heavily regulated ‘white’ body and the trope of the curvaceous, exoticised, non-white
(implicitly black) body. Similarly to the racial ambiguity ascribed to Latina/Latinos in
American media, Kardashian actively facilitates her presence in both racial realms while
also moving between them, reifying an essentialist notion of whiteness and blackness while
doing so (Beltrán 2007, Molina-Guzmán 2010). Priscilla Peña Ovalle (2011, p. 7) deploys
the term ‘racial mobility’ to describe the ability of Latina entertainers to ‘oscillate between
the normalcy of whiteness and the exoticism of blackness, [functioning] as an in-between
body to mediate and maintain the racial status quo’. Kardashian has a similar capacity to
move between these poles. Yet her usage of her Armenian heritage to authenticate her body,
130 A. Sastre

and the uniqueness of the platform of reality television, complicates the racialisation of her
body in new ways.
Susan Bordo (1995, p. 99) discusses women’s contentious relationship to food, and
the emphasis placed on regulating, disciplining and controlling the body to conform it to
Western standards of beauty. Though the influence of this mentality, enabled in complex
ways by the entertainment and marketing industries, is increasingly pervasive, it is arguably
driven by norms that reflect a white body ideal and privileged class status. Recalling the
‘civility, tradition and savoir-faire of Europe’, this ideal white body is cerebral, contained
and in stark contrast to the ostensibly fleshy, bacchanalian non-white body. The white body
to which American women are told to aspire is toned, streamlined and most importantly, a
constant project. It is an object to be consistently improved, arguably to support the many
industries that make available and render ‘necessary’ a litany of products to support the
interminable quest for perfection. This is the docile body of Foucault (1990), a form that
maintains social norms at the risk of failure and threat of punishment. Kardashian, both
through the practice of her material body and the platform of her visible body, expresses
this normative white body through various means: cellulite treatment, diet-pill endorse-
ments and a constant emphasis on fitness, including the production and sale of her own
line of workout DVDs.
In the second season of Keeping Up, Kardashian is featured preparing for a calen-
dar pictorial. Before shooting, Kardashian decides to undergo cellulite treatment to be in
‘the best shape possible’, despite the fact that she ‘works out all the time (Keeping Up
With the Kardashians, 2008a). The treatment is featured in graphic detail on the show, the
camera zooming into the crevice of her ass as the machine suctions her skin. The expe-
rience is playfully sexualised, with her sister Khloe commenting that, ‘[I]t’s almost like a
porno: you don’t want to take your eyes off [it]. (Keeping Up With the Kardashians, 2008a)
This moment embodies Bordo’s (1995, p. 104) recognition of ‘the explosion of technolo-
gies aimed at bodily correction and enhancement’, a phenomenon that is treated glibly by
Kardashian. Not only is there no question that before baring her body she would refine it
to fit normative standards of beauty, but also there is no consideration of the cost of this
ostensibly expensive treatment, touted on the show as top-of-the-line.
In addition to the variety of technologies increasingly available to craft the perfect body,
Bordo (1995, p. 99) notes the pervasive, powerful, ‘romantic mystification of diet pills
as part of the obscure, eternal arsenal of feminine arts’. Kardashian and her sisters have
endorsed the Quicktrim line of diet pills and weight-loss products since mid-2009. Touted
as ‘body beautification as individual as you are’ (Quicktrim Diet 2009b) Quicktrim’s
hyper-feminine, pink-and-purple website prominently features the Kardashian sisters, con-
fident and, fittingly, trim. The pill endorsement is treated with levity on the show, as if an
artificial regimen is a normal part of the requisite self-maintenance process. Kardashian
regularly poses for new Quicktrim campaigns, one of which portrays her embodying a
white ideal even more directly, replacing her normally dark mane with a mass of bright
blonde hair.
A similar image is presented on the cover of Kardashian’s fitness venture, Fit in Your
Jeans by Friday (Fit in Your Jeans by Friday 2009a), a series of workout videos that claim
to tone the body while allowing you to ‘flaunt your curves’. The product’s various covers
advertise the DVD’s ability to provide guidance on ‘creating’ a toned body and maintain-
ing a curvaceous one. Ostensibly featuring the fitness routine Kardashian herself follows,
the workout DVDs reflect the fact that she remains known for her shapely figure despite
the routine policing of her body. It is this body and the public fascination with her volup-
tuousness and prominent butt that continue to in many ways facilitate her media presence.
 Celebrity Studies 131

Referencing blackness: Kardashian’s authentic ‘Armenian ass’

Kardashian’s butt, and the public’s fixation on this body part, reflects the historic treat-
ment of black bodies in the media. Despite the process of controlling her body that reflects
a history of whiteness, the emphasis on her butt, from the lingering opening shots of her
reality show to the barrage of websites that compare it to other celebrity figures, also places
Kardashian squarely within a history of the exoticised, ‘othered’ body. Her butt is framed
as both a marker of her uniqueness and of her supposed sexual deviance, her flesh ren-
dered both freakish and an object of fascination. As Priscilla Netto notes in her work on
the lasting impact of Sarah Baartman, the original ‘Hottentot Venus’, on black female
representation, this was a body that was literally and figuratively deconstructed.2 Writes
Netto (2005, p.152), ‘[N]ot only is the gaze displaced from the genitalia to the buttocks
but it also allows the colonial gaze to continue gazing and observing while disavowing the
sexual nature of the gaze.’ The fact that Kardashian’s body connotes a history of other
marginalised bodies and an ongoing reality of painful exclusion, but has served only to
bring her visibility and financial success, has seemingly caused resentment of Kardashian
by some members of the black community. In a recent episode of the CW show H8R,
Kardashian was confronted by a frustrated woman on this very subject, bringing to light
some of the negative perceptions of how Kardashian displays and talks about her figure.3
H8R pairs celebrities with their biggest ‘hater’, a person who strongly dislikes the par-
ticular celebrity in question. Kardashian’s ‘hater’ is a young black woman, Deena, who
dislikes the reality star because she feels she is ‘fake’, and essentially encroaching on the
territory of black women, both in the way she cultivates her public body and through her
frequent romantic relationships with black men. When Deena is introduced, she calls out
Kardashian as ‘a thief. She’s got the fake booty, she’s all over the media with our men –
everything about [her] is fake’ (H8R 2011). Deena cites Kardashian’s body as inauthentic,
and more broadly questions its status as a marginalised body – she is not black, she is con-
ventionally beautiful and, moreover, is wealthy, elite and powerful. Through flaunting her
curvaceous body, she has then ‘stolen’ the only thing that, according to Deena, has histor-
ically allowed black women ‘a corner on the market’. Deena goes on to claim she speaks
for a community of black women, explaining:

There a few of us who feel like she’s stealing our shine. When the black guys are like, ‘who’s
this Kim Kardashian, she’s got a fat ass’, I’m not gonna lie, I feel a little jealous. She comes
out of nowhere – people have been giving me shit for my shape since I was young . . . [W]hen
you see Kim and her family benefitting on a grand level, making six million dollars a year, of
course I’m jealous.

Kardashian is thus called out for capitalising on a body that in her case is positively marked
as ‘exotic’ without any of the burdens that typically also accompany that designation. Given
that her skin is white and that her features are coded as ambiguously ethnic, Kardashian
is afforded a range of racial mobility that black celebrities like Beyoncé, no matter how
light-skinned, are ultimately denied (Railton and Watson 2005, Durham 2012).4 What’s
more, Kardashian, already wealthy before obtaining reality-television fame, is capitalising
on her body in ways most women, black or otherwise, are rarely allowed to.
In an attempt to refute these criticisms and authenticate the body that allowed her strate-
gic access to the black realm, Kardashian cites her Armenian heritage, telling Deena,
‘I’m Armenian. You look at my aunts and my cousins, we have that curvy body too,
it’s not just an African-American thing’ (H8R 2011). In referencing her Armenian her-
itage as the source of the very body that marks her as non-white, Kardashian complicates
132 A. Sastre

her in-between positioning and reifies the black/white binary even more. Unlike Ovalle’s
examples of Latina stars like Rita Moreno and Jennifer Lopez, whose ethnicity techni-
cally can encompass a range of racial identities within it, Armenians are Caucasian, not
only by heritage but also by legal designation. In 1925, ‘United States v. Cartozian [. . .]
affirmed the whiteness of Armenians’ before an Oregon district court (Gualtieri 2001,
p. 49). Befitting ‘the old imperialist conviction that closeness to Europe meant closeness to
“civilization”’, Armenians’ ‘European origin’ and ‘Alpine stock’ were cited as evidence of
their whiteness (Gualtieri 2001, p. 49). Sarah Gualtieri notes that the US v. Cartozian case is
particularly meaningful because it is embedded within a complicated history of American
immigration, coming at a moment where the potential not only to metaphorically belong
but also to actually be granted citizenship often depended on these very categorisations.
Whereas whiteness has historically operated as the hegemonic norm, the implicit invisi-
bility of that positioning (Redmond 2007) is, as demonstrated by Kardashian’s strategic
distortion of her Armenian heritage, not always desirable. Rather than resorting, as she
has done at other times, to what Kobena Mercer calls the ‘political unconscious of white
ethnicity’ (Mercer 1991, p. 190), Kardashian here requires a marked ethnic identity to legit-
imise the critiques of her body as artificial, and so relies on the ‘constitutive ambivalence
that structures whiteness as a cultural identity’ (Mercer 1991, p. 190), manipulating her
heritage into a useful tool in her performance of ‘otherness’.5

X-ray vision: rendering truth through the body visible

Kardashian’s use of her Armenian heritage to legitimise herself (and her curvaceous
body) as non-white problematically essentialises both whiteness and non-whiteness. Most
important, however, is that Kardashian is able to do so from a position of privilege
and on a far-reaching platform. In his work on racial authenticity, John Jackson (2005,
p. 66) explains the link between attempts to ‘police [oneself] through authenticity’ and the
desire ‘to fix the realities of social identity’. As Kardashian’s body is not simply mobile
but visible, her negotiations of authenticity and racial identity are also embedded within
larger narratives of modern fame and the myth of ever-accessible, public celebrity.
And so it is that we return to the X-ray, the seemingly trivial instance that brings
together Kardashian’s sexual body, racial body and visible body. In the sixth season of
Keeping up with the Kardashians, Kardashian decides to have an X-ray image taken of her
rear end after growing sick of the rumours that she has had implants. She explains:

People ask me all the time if my butt is real . . . [T]his has been going on for years and it’s
so ridiculous. I’ve said numerous times I haven’t had plastic surgery, I haven’t had implants
. . . [W]ho the hell of a normal person gets butt implants? (Keeping Up With the Kardashians
2011a)

Kardashian then goes to her doctor’s office with her sisters to get an X-ray of her butt
and verify that her flesh is unaltered. When the X-rays are completed and Kardashian’s
butt is deemed by the supervising medical professional as implant-free, the sisters take
a photograph of Kardashian pointing to her X-ray and quickly post it online (Kardashian
2011) Kardashian adds a caption to the picture that reads ‘nothing like a good old Armenian
ass to get your day going!’ (Keeping Up With the Kardashians 2011a). Evidence is thus
marshalled, both in person, on camera and online, to show that Kardashian’s is a physically
real, ‘authentic’ body, and one which is regularly, and now entirely, exposed.
 Celebrity Studies 133

Kardashian’s statement, the decision to undergo the X-ray and her treatment of the sub-
ject publicly imbricate the aforementioned discussions of both the authenticity of her body
and her positioning of her Armenian heritage alongside it. The X-ray presents the most
literal example of the fragmentation of her body, and notably places it within a medical con-
text. This move directly recalls a history of fragmenting and pathologising the non-white
female form. More gruesomely, after years of public display before European audiences,
Sarah Baartman’s body was also taken apart after her death and re-inscribed as a medical
specimen, a dehumanised artefact and object of study. In Kardashian’s case, the fragmen-
tation is not literal, but as a representational pulling-apart it is more than metaphoric; only
her butt is seen, and nothing of the rest of her body, reiterating its operationalisation as a
synecdoche for the authenticity of her entire self.
Yet Kardashian’s X-rayed rear end more importantly introduces the entirely new ele-
ment of technological mediation to its fragmented visibility. It is these new modes of
producing and reproducing Kardashian’s body that call into question constructions of com-
plicity and authorship that have long followed public female bodies in particular. In his
discussion of the impact of new media on the performance of self, P. David Marshall
addresses the contemporary shift to what he terms a ‘presentational regime’. In contrast
with earlier ‘representational regimes’, this new mode of producing the self is particu-
larly applicable to the modern celebrity. ‘In contrast to the general discrete and structured
quality of past film, television and popular music’ (Marshall 2006, p. 641) contemporary
fame is grounded in a new online medium that allows for the ultimate ‘revelation of the
private self’ in the quest to ‘uncover the “real” and authentic person behind the public
display’ (2006, p. 639). Kardashian’s butt X-ray might, then, be considered the ultimate
public display of authenticity, the exposure and verification not only of a famous body’s
corporeality but also of that star’s willingness to bare all to prove she is, in fact, ‘real’.
This decision to cast her audience as the ultimate voyeurs of her body has paid off: with
nearly 18 million people following her on the social media platform Twitter in early 2013,
Kardashian’s fame and celebrity have seemingly only grown the more visible she’s made
herself to fans.
This choice to get an X-ray, record the process and disseminate the results online and on
television might be considered the ultimate move towards marking Kardashian as authen-
tic, despite her conflicting and often controversial portrayals of her sex life, raced body
and privileged status. At its most literal reading, this transparent body has nothing to hide,
is fully accessible and exemplifies a collapsing of the private self with the public self. Yet
despite the imagined role of new media in facilitating a free-for-all marketplace of fame,
Kardashian’s existing position as a public body could also be considered dependent on
her continued exposure to retain this visibility. In this case, the X-ray can be seen as a
necessary revelation, a move to solidify the ever-slippery requirement of both authenticity
and uniqueness that accompanies what Graeme Turner deems the ‘demotic turn’. To retain
visibility in an age that ‘provides opportunities for participation that are so widespread
and various that they constitute a form of democratization’ (Turner 2010, p. 1), there is
increasing onus on already-visible figures to expose ever more in the hopes of maintaining
the very raw ‘ordinary-ness’ that made them famous in the first place. As she was already a
Hollywood socialite before entering the media sphere, Kardashian is not the typical ‘ordi-
nary celebrity’ that Turner identifies, but is still operating within this new media economy
of visibility. Moreover, one of the few things she is credited with, besides her physical
attributes, is her supposed media and marketing savvy, so presumably she is aware of these
necessary requirements of modern fame.
134 A. Sastre

The question, then, is whether Kardashian is complicit in the authorship of her public
self. In his work on visibility, Andrea Brighenti (2007, p. 336) writes that ‘the mere fact of
being aware of one’s own visibility status – and not the fact of being under actual control
– effectively influences one’s behaviour.’ He argues that while visibility can be a valuable
commodity, it also has the Foucauldian capacity to become a tool for surveillance, and in
a ‘disciplinary society, visibility [can] mean disempowerment’ (Brighenti 2007, p. 336).
This perspective positions the visible subject as heavily policed, immobilised by scrutiny
rather than empowered by their public platform. Wrestling with public demand seems part
and parcel of reality-television fame, being that it is grounded on little more than exposure
for its own sake. Kardashian, with her ability to be concurrently deviant and normative,
white and privileged, and non-white and exotic, may very well be both highly visible and
still in authorial control of her image, though this status is fickle, even for such a savvy
self-promoter.

Conclusion
Whether or not she is truly agential or subject to the greater forces of visibility is still
up for debate, yet there is little doubt that Kardashian’s image operates in various com-
plex ways. Despite coming into the public eye through an explicit video that is one of
the top-selling celebrity tapes on the market (Vivid Celebs 2012) she works to reflect
broader heteronormative structures that emphasise monogamy, family and privatised sex-
uality. Kardashian also straddles the space between white and non-white identity, policing
and regulating the curves that made her famous while authenticating her body through
the strategic deployment of her ethnic heritage. Kardashian’s trajectory echoes that of
a broader history of women whose bodies were and are public and exotic, constructed
and authentic in often contradictory ways. Moreover, Kardashian exercises her public
identity across a range of media platforms that include reality television and various social-
media tools that keep her consistently visible and ‘accessible’ to the public. Throughout,
Kardashian utilises narratives of authenticity to both obtain and maintain this viable and
fragile visibility. Yet authenticity itself is illusory, as the recent backlash to Kardashian’s
divorce demonstrates that perhaps the only taboo in today’s heavily mediated version of
reality-television celebrity is acknowledging the fact that it is actively, artificially produced.
Ironically, it is this truth that threatens the accessibility required of these demotic stars. The
negative public response to Kardashian’s brief marriage demonstrates that, despite her con-
stant espousal of realness, there are consequences to revealing the production behind her
public self.
In October of 2011, Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event aired on E!
(Keeping Up With the Kardashians, 2011c). The special garnered the highest-ever rankings
for the network (Stelter 2011) as millions tuned in to see Kardashian walk down the aisle.
The production was suitably grand, earning Kardashian a reported $18 million in endorse-
ments and advertising revenue (Fagen 2011). Unsurprisingly, Kardashian’s wedding was
a very traditional event, as the bride walked down the aisle in a sea of white and met her
groom before a giant cross of flowers. The pinnacle of normativity, Kardashian was suppos-
edly living her often repeated dream of settling down and starting a family. Yet the deluge of
press came a month later when it was announced that Kardashian had filed for divorce from
her new husband just 72 days into their marriage. Despite Kardashian’s recent media dom-
inance, this divorce, according to The New York Times’ Frank Bruni (2011) demonstrated
that ‘the nation’s poster girl for old-fashioned virtues [. . .] brought something less than
steadfast and humble commitment to her marriage’, which itself was ‘lousy with product
 Celebrity Studies 135

placements and underwritten with a reported multimillion-dollar payment (which her fam-
ily has vaguely denied) for television rights’. Bruni’s sarcasm was just one in the cacophony
of voices that decried the marriage as a sham, from gay-rights activists outraged that their
right to wed was denied while Kardashian was able trivialise the institution, to former fans
who found it increasingly difficult to relate to Kardashian’s stealthy manipulation of her
public image. Yet while this vehement backlash demonstrates the fickleness of visibility, it
more importantly reifies that its required authenticity is in fact a performance. ‘“Reality”
in any tangible sense, relates more to a “structure of feeling” [. . .] rather than to an objec-
tively observable and external truth’ explain Woods and Skeggs (2011, p. 94) in their work
on reality television. It is the violation of this affective reality that, above any previous
infractions, put Kardashian’s image at risk. The truth may be that her marriage was staged,
but that is not the desired version of the story. Kardashian was on to something when she
spun her sex tape into a narrative of violated privacy and her Armenian heritage into a
way to ‘legitimately’ Orientalise herself; modern visibility requires subsuming even evi-
dent deviance under a palatable rubric of normativity, carefully constructing an authentic
accessibility yet never actually allowing things to get too real.

Notes
1. It was widely speculated that Kardashian and her mother Kris Jenner were themselves
responsible for the leaking of Kardashian’s sex tape and that they orchestrated a deal with
Vivid Entertainment to distribute the video. These allegations against Kardashian and Jenner
were reportedly reiterated during the 2012 divorce proceedings between Kardashian and her
ex-husband Kris Humphries (Sheridan 2012).
2. In the early eighteenth century, Baartman, a Khosian woman from South Africa, was toured
around Europe as a spectacle because of her prominent rear end and genitalia. After her death,
her body was dismembered and stored in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, her remains only
returned to her native South Africa in 2002 (Anon 2002). Her treatment was abhorrent but not
rare, and her story has since been given the attention of scholarly work on race and gender
(Gilman 1985, Barrera 2002, Qureshi 2004).
3. The short lived CW network show H8R was produced by Kim Kardashian and porn entrepreneur
Joe Francis, famous for producing the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video series. Its premise was that each
week a celebrity faced his or her most vehement critic, or ‘hater’, and attempted to win them
over. These ‘haters’ were non-famous people cast by producers. The celebrities featured, which
included both Francis and Kardashian, were individuals who had been criticised in the media or
were otherwise deemed to be controversial figures. The show was cancelled after four episodes
due to low ratings and amidst criticism that it was little more than an opportunity for celebrities
to exploit a negative image (Holmes 2011).
4. Recently, Beyoncé has come under fire for potentially using skin-lightening creams and likely
having her skin digitally lightened in cosmetics ads. The public push to determine whether her
skin was lightened in reality or only on film arguably points to longstanding anxieties around
the boundaries of blackness and black female identity from both within and outside the black
community (Alibhai-Brown 2011, Wilson 2012).
5. Whiteness studies has emerged as a field in the last 15 years. It explores the construction of
‘white’ identity both as a distinct category and as a prism through which to understand other
racial and ethnicity categorisations. See Weigman (1999), Nakayama and Martin (1999) and
Rasmussen (2001).

Notes on contributor
Ms Sastre is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for
Communication. Her research addresses the construction and commodification of ethnicity in pop-
ular culture, the ways bodies perform as communicative tools, and how reality television operates
as a strategic platform for visibility. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Swarthmore
College, and a Master’s degree in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania.
136 A. Sastre

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