Why do you hate the Kardashians?
I get a lot of raised eyebrows each time I share any Kardashian-related information. For the most part, people don’t associate a triple degree holder, one foot firmly in academia scholar with the KarJenners in seriousness. I get it as well, when I dropped the bomb on my advisor about writing a Ph.D. on Kim Kardashian in 2016, she flipped. She told me to take some time off and think, as though I had lost my mind (which, to be fair, graduate school and dissertation writing are notorious for anyway). What started as a joke (to me), turned into a full-blown culture studies phenomenon. I recall a conference being centered around KarJenners, celebrity, and reality TV culture (I missed the deadline to submit a pitch) and this is just in academia. Outside of our tiny bubble, the world was fully engrossed in watching Kim, momager Kris and Ye, taking the world by storm (actually Kylie took the world by Stormi but that’s a conversation for my gay friends and me). The Kardashians emerged as the biggest celebrity brand in the world with a net worth together that can make Jeff and Elon unionize with other billionaires to compete against the femme power of the sisters. Math isn’t my strongest strength and truth be told, any number of zeroes I add to their total net worth will not be accurate. The Kardashians and the Jenners are bigger than most of us.