Written by Sarah Smyth as part of our theme week on Reality TV.
Kim Kardashian is, arguably, one of the most visible celebrities of the 21st century. She’s prolific in all forms of popular media including the tabloid press, television, social media, and other internet outlets, and her recent attempt to “break the internet” demonstrates her power and command over these sources. Yet, her prolificacy resides not only in the sheer outlandishness, excess, and controversy of her fame. Rather the success of her celebrity status is situated in the hyper-visible presentation of her body. In particular, through the continual display of her naked body (something in which certain magazines are particularly interested), Kardashian quite literally embodies the complex construction of the female body as something to be looked at. And with her body being so readily, excessively, and continually put on show, can we help but do anything but look?
Using Kardashian’s hit reality television show, Keeping up with the Kardashians, as a framing device for the presentation of her body, in this article, I will attempt to unpick the multiple ways in which Kardashian’s naked body becomes looked at. Looking at three examples of her nakedness, her sex tape, Playboy photo shoot and Paper photo shoot, I will demonstrate how Kardashian both internalizes and reasserts the strict social and cultural monitoring of the female body’s naked display, as well as the construction of the naked female body as a sexually objectified and fetishized image for the male gaze.
Firstly, I will consider the way in which Kardashian’s naked body becomes looked at through her sex tape. In the pilot episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, appropriately named, “I’m watching you”, Kardashian worries about going on The Tyra Banks Show to discuss her sex tape. Eventually she does – who can turn down that free publicity?! – but only to show remorse and regret for her “inappropriate” actions. She tells Banks, “[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… 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.” Kardashian’s worries about going on the show and her eventual plea for forgiveness demonstrate the way in which we rigidly monitor and discipline the presentation of the (naked) female body and female sexuality. Leading social critic and philosopher, Michel Foucault explains in his book, Discipline and Punish, that we are not only surveyed by various forms of authority and power, but that we also learn to internalise this surveillance causing us to discipline ourselves. Using the structure of the Panopticon, a kind of prison where the prisoners are constantly watched by guards who are themselves hidden, Foucault demonstrates the way in which we are constantly monitored in our everyday life to the extent that we learn to maintain and embody a kind of self-surveillance.
Although not in a literal prison, Keeping up with the Kardashians reflect this monitoring in several ways. Firstly, as Lucia Soriano claims, “In Foucauldian terms, the viewer [of the show] takes on the role and monitors the Kardashians’ bodies to “assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits.” Foucault conveys that “the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” hence, “the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.” In other words, when we think about Keeping Up with the Kardashians, regardless if the camera is on or off, they are conditioned to continuously inspect themselves.”
However, the show is not the only place where this monitoring occurs. Kardashian’s appearance on The Tyra Banks Show also demonstrates this surveillance, both by the viewers and by Kardashian herself. Attempting to emphasize her long-term relationship with her partner, as well as her position as a role model for other young girls, Kardashian is aware of but crucially never challenges the societal and cultural demand for women to embody and also present a private and heteronormative constructed naked body.
This moment directly contrasts with a later episode, “Birthday Suit,” in which Kardashian now struggles with the decision of whether or not to pose naked for Playboy magazine. Again, Kardashian demonstrates an awareness of the socially and culturally sanctions placed on women’s presentation of their bodies as she worries about how the nude shoot would impact on her image. She claims, “Ever since the sex-tape scandal, I have to be really careful in how I’m perceived.” Kardashian, it seems, has internalized the wider monitoring of her body to the extent that she now places boundaries and sanctions on the presentation and visibility of her naked body. In the end, she decides to do it. Again, this kind of publicity is too good to pass up.
The difference in this situation, however, is that, framed within male sexual desire, Playboy legitimizes her naked and sexual(ized) body through what Alexandra Sastre calls the normative and regulated sexual practice of posing for Playboy. As Laura Mulvey argues in her famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” (heterosexual) men have the authority of the look. Examining film in particular, Mulvey argues that male protagonist is the active subject in contrast to the women who functions as a passive and erotic object. Functioning as the identificatory anchor for the (assumed) male spectator, the man is the bearer of the look whereas the woman is there to be looked at. In this way, through Playboy’s conventional heteronormative and phallocentric structures of looking, the magazine legitimizes the display of Kardashian’s naked body. Whereas Kardashian’s sex tape suggests an authority and autonomy over the creation of the tape which makes ambiguous the intended spectator – Kim jokingly says on the show that she made it because “[she] was horny and [she] felt like it” – Playboy reasserts normative and accepted forms of looking at Kardashian’s naked body.
Although both my examples occurred in an early part of Kardashian’s career, the way we look at her naked body continues to be a point of discussion, controversy, and criticism. The backlash surrounding her now famous photo shoot for Paper magazine demonstrates the way in which Kardashian’s body or, perhaps more accurately, the display of her body is still a site for intense scrutiny, monitoring and judgment. Some, including this Bitch Flicks piece, explored Kardashian’s use of cultural appropriation by presenting her body in a similar way to “freakish” yet fetishized Black bodies. Not only is this particularly disturbing and offensive in itself, but it also adds another complex layer as to how we look at Kardashian’s naked body. In her essay, “Eating the Other,” bell hooks discusses the way in which “ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is white cultural.” What particularly interests me is the way in which hooks discusses the young white male’s fascination and desire to have sex with women from ethnic minorities. She says, “To these young males and their buddies, fucking was a way to confront the Other… They claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier…”
What becomes disconcerting, then, when considering who is looking at Kardashian’s naked body in Paper is the way in which her cultural appropriation directly feeds into the fetishizing, objectification, and commodification of the black female body in particular by white males. In this way, her body continues to function as a complex and ambiguous site of problematic form of looking. As Kardashian’s body continues as a hyper-visible image in the collective cultural consciousness, we can only hope that we learn to break down the ways of looking at her body in order to dismantle our complicity in the policing, objectification and fetishization of her naked body.
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Sarah Smyth recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.