Keeping Up The Kardashian Brand

The Kardashian family is a contemporary cultural touchstone, recognizable throughout the world connoting warrantless celebrity, voluptuous beauty, and social media savviness. Amanda Scheiner McClain explores the Kardashians’ brand and celebrity via narrative discourse analyses of their hit reality television series, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, social media utilization, and popular press coverage. This triangulated study allows insight into contemporaneous American culture: societal norms, values, and ideologies, as well as structural and cultural aspects of cross-platform brand creation. The television series examination finds intrinsic paradoxes of sexuality/conservatism, family/business, beauty/unhappiness, narcissism/celebrity, intimate/transgressiveness, and traditional/nontraditional gender roles, as well as materialism and public vs. private spheres themes. In addition, a study of the Kardashian blogs and Twitter use finds that their careful participation amplifies celebrity and unifies the overall brand into a single, sellable image across media. Through interactive media and just being themselves, the Kardashians renovate banal status updates and hackneyed reality television into character-constructing building blocks of brand, celebrity, and profits.

Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century. Elana Levine brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these essays show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape. Incisive and compelling, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.

In the instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, Jeetendr Sehdev inspires people everywhere to learn from the way celebrities engage their fan bases. In the space of five years, Jeetendr Sehdev has shaken up the world of entertainment by revealing how social media stars generate more obsession than the Hollywood A-list. What can he teach us about making our own ideas, products, and services break through? Sehdev shows why successful images today–the most famous being Kim Kardashian–are not photoshopped to perfection, but flawed, vulnerable, and in your face. This total transparency generates a level of authenticity that traditional marketing tactics just can’t touch. From YouTube sensations like Jenna Marbles to billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, The Kim Kardashian Principle reveals the people, products, and brands that do it best. After all, in a world where a big booty can break the Internet and the president is a reality TV star, self-obsession is a must-have. No posturing, no apologies, and no shying away from the spotlight. The Kim Kardashian Principle is a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening guide to understanding why only the boldest and baddest ideas will survive–and how to make sure yours is one of them.

An authorized, three-way confessional by the reality television celebrities shares fun facts about their shared childhoods, presents beauty and style secrets, and reveals family insights that sustain their professional lives.

Everybody's favorite "momager," the businesswoman behind the Kardashian empire, shares her never-before-told story.

Traces the rise of the Kardashian and Jenner families to reality show and tabloid fame. Discusses the negative publicity that has overshadowed their recent years while scrutinizing charges of exploitation that have targeted Kris Jenner, Rob Kardashian, and Caitlyn Jenner.

Dollhouse is a first fiction collaboration by the fabulous Kardashian sisters— Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé. Fans will love this novel which reveals the inner workings of a glamorous, high profile, and complicated family which, at the center of their universe, is one with a huge heart and a lot of love. The novel offers a dramatic peek into the lives of a trio of sibling celebrities who are not always as they appear in the Hollywood gossip magazines.

KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS: Kim Kardashain, Kris Jenner, Kylie Jenner, The Kardashians - 4 books in 1Featuring... *Kim Kardashian*Kris Jenner*Kylie Jenner*The Kardashians 4 Great Books in 1! Kim Kardashian Love them or hate them, there is no discussion of the phenomena of modern celebrity without its apex creatures, the Kardashian family. The Kardashians are exceptional in every sense of the word. A non-traditional, racially-diverse, blended family from immigrant stock, they are also spearheaded and moved by empowered women with limited education. How this brood turned the proverbial 15 minutes of fame into 15 fabulous years of that plus staggering fortune is practically a fairy tale. This is lightning in a bottle, especially for reality TV stars whose initial, ambiguous claims to fame were links to a 1970s sports icon, a 1990s murder trial and a 2007 starlet sex tape. The once unconventional family name has since become an unforgettable global brand, monetized by its members into various forms into a collective valuation of well over one billion dollars. And the journey all began with Kim. Kim Kardashian, Superstar? "Superstar" does not even begin to cut it. What she eventually became was a constellation of superstar. This is her story... Kris Jenner This is Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner, or whatever incarnation she chooses to go by these days. With everything she has achieved, she could be anything. But before she got here she was Kris Houghton, beautiful teen from a broken family, on the lookout for a better life and seeing it linked to securing a good husband. She was Mrs. Robert Kardashian, high school graduate suddenly swept off her feet and into the halls of the powerful, popular and wealthy - and expected to play the part of Beverly Hills homemaker to the hilt. She was Mrs. Bruce Jenner, finally able to spread her wings and explore her heretofore undiscovered talents of managing a brand and a business. She was the former Mrs. Caitlyn Jenner too, from when her husband transitioned to a woman and she consequently had to weather the storms as gracefully as possible, before the cruel glare of the spotlight and the public eye. She now holds pride in her main role of mom and manager - "momager" - to her Kardashian and Jenner children, through five of whom, she is also a loving and indulgent grandmother. This is Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner - SELF-MADE - and all the she had made of herself, by herself. This is her story. Kylie JennerThe Kardashian family has ignited many a national debate on a variety of topics over their more than ten years in the spotlight, and on complex issues at that. Their prominence has repeatedly raised interesting questions on what it means to be a family, on modern-day celebrity, racial politics, female sexuality and gender norms. And now, with Kylie Jenner's news-making Forbes cover, the family has stirred the pot again... The Kardashians "The American Dream" are words often uttered with the reverence it deserves. It is a collective ethos, a defining piece of national character that champions the idea that the individuals of a country, regardless of their background, would be able to maximize their personal potentials in pursuit of their happiness and success. It is a vision of meritocracy, where hard work, risk-taking and gumption is rewarded; where everyone has ample opportunity to show and be justly compensated for their abilities, determination and daring. It is an appropriately new vision, for the New World. It is a bold, revolutionary vision. But by its very name, "The American Dream" is just that - a dream. It is an acknowledgement that reality does not always match the ideal. It requires work and protection to continue being upheld. But for one family, the dream has become a reality.

Kendall and Kylie Jenner, stars on the hit reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, present their debut novel—a thrilling dystopian story about two super-powered girls who embark on a journey together. In a world of the far future, the great City of Indra has two faces: a beautiful paradise floating high in the sky, and a nightmare world of poverty carved beneath the surface of the Earth. Lex grew up in an orphanage deep in the dark. But even as a child, she instinctively rebelled against her fate—the time when she would be judged either useful to Society or forced to live among the mutations in Rock Bottom, the lowest level. When she is chosen to become an elite cadet of the Population Control Forces, only her fellow cadet Kane truly understands her longing for freedom. Unknown to her, one girl secretly shares her defiance. Livia Cosmo, the Orphan Airess, may live on a sky island surrounded by wealth and privilege, but she is just as restricted as Lex. Rigid discipline governs her every movement, as she learns the art of becoming a Proper Young Woman, the belle of the Emergence Ball, ready to be picked for “cohabitation” by the finest of the Proper Young Men. Her future is assured, until an intriguing encounter with a young man named Kane changes everything. For that is when Lex’s and Livia’s destinies collide…. Approached by an old enemy to help save Kane from mortal danger, Lex sacrifices her Special Ops career to find him in the Islands among the clouds. Her search, high above in the beautiful spires of the City of Indra, brings her instead to the airgirl Livia. Lex and Livia should have nothing in common, and yet they share a kindred yearning for escape from the strict rules that bind them...and a mystifying identical mark. Brought together by danger, they set out to find Kane, but what they discover is even stranger than either dreams.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Crazy Rich comes a blockbuster unauthorized biography of one of the most famous and ubiquitous family dynasties in contemporary culture: The Kardashians. Secrets and scandals of the Kardashians, so closely held that not even hard core fans have heard about them, are finally exposed in New York Times bestselling author Jerry Oppenheimer's forensic dissection of the infamous reality TV clan. From the curious life of patriarch Robert Kardashian, whose family meatpacking business was tainted by scandal, to “momager” Kris Jenner’s top-secret plan for the future, The Kardashians reveals the untold, definitive story based on two years of investigative reporting and scores of candid, on-the-record interviews, ranging from childhood friends to powerful business associates, who break their silence for the first time. In the decade since the Kardashians first appeared on the scene, millions of speculative words have been written about their drama-filled lives. But most has been tabloid hype and gossip column fantasy. Until now. Oppenheimer has written revelatory books on such international icons as the Clintons, the Kennedys, the Hiltons and more, and now comes The Kardashians, the true story that will make headlines and shock even the most loyal fans.