We’re all tired of seeing the photos, whether in their original forms or fucked up caricatures of them. I do not intend to feed the already massive celebrity industrial complex that embezzles visibility in place of actual ‘issues’. By no means is this some sort of vindication for Kim Kardashian’s character or recent reproaches for which I could care less (my expectations of her are already low). What I’m more interested in is the dialogue around her identity as she presents the only Armenian-related issue or person in popular US media. And it is necessary for Armenian-identified people to be included in the conversation around and beyond Kim’s Armenian ass.
One thing I want to first highlight, before I delve into the heart of this, is the fucked up ways that media consumers have and continue to react to her overt nudity. It’s accumulated a ton of excessive body and identity policing: girl-on-girl hate, slutshaming, motherhood qualms, photoshop drama from ‘real’ women, repulsive photo parodies, celebrity ass polls, and Armenians who contest her Armenianness because she’s ‘half-blooded’ and Americanized. Even commentaries that attempted to deconstruct the racial undertones of the photographs still perpetuated sexist language. Her body, or more particularly, her ass, has been casually referred to as: a shiny planetoid, greasy ass, megabutt, Barcalounger, freakish, a racehorse, a glazed donut, and Homer Simpson’s mouth, among others.
Despite whatever validity of some of those claims, she can and should do whatever the fuck she wants with her body. We don’t have to like it. But beyond the surface-level feelings that the photo shoot evokes, it does contain a much deeper interplay between structural oppressions (and identity politics) around race, class and gender.
The renowned photographer responsible for the shoot, Jean-Paul Goude, a white Frenchman, was fascinated by ‘grotesque’, ‘freakish’ bodies and ethnic minorities and has reputedly fetishized and racialized Black females in his work. In the 1970s he stated “Blacks are the premise of my work. . . I had Jungle Fever.” Paper Magazine’s photo of Kim balancing a champagne glass on her behind was a reproduction of Goude’s 1976 photo shoot of Carolina Beaumont that was featured in his autobiography Jungle Fever. Janell Hobson deconstructs the image as follows:
“The subject wears an ‘exotic’ hairstyle and ‘smiles’ for the camera in the pose of a ‘happy savage pleased to serve,’” she says, “which suggests her complicity in having her body depicted as a literal object, a ‘primitive’ vision to provide pornographic pleasure and intoxication presumably for a white male spectator.
The similarities between the two photographs are blatant. Yet, in the original photograph, Beaumont is totally bare, lending an air of exploitative primitivity and animalization, whereas Kim Kardashian flaunts a rather extortionate dress and set of accessories. As the photo series progresses we see her revealing only parts of her body until she is completely naked. This indicates to me that she maintains some autonomy, or choice, over her own oppression and sexual ‘mystique’ whereas Beaumont does not. There are a lot of nuances at play here that are challenging to pinpoint. What exactly was Goude’s photographic intent behind the reproduction and why was Kim his object of choice? How does she play with Blackness (or anti-Blackness) and racialization? Is this appropriation, and if so, can this sort of oppression be appropriated?
Both images certainly intend to satisfy a white male imagination. Her body is still a fetishized, racialized and objectified spectacle. Kim (and her ass) is so socially consumable because, comparative to the white, thin female bodies that police the beauty bar in mainstream media in the US, her body and facial makeup are rendered exotic and almost freak-like. Though, Kim as being an ‘ethnic’ figure is virtually absent from this narrative. Her ethnic otherness is something that we see but do not for some reason acknowledge.
Although she is undeniably class privileged, she’s also undeniably part Armenian. She appears and is pigeonholed as ‘ethnic’ because she is ‘ethnic’ (shocker). Her body (like mine) is stereotypically and singularly Armenian though it is compared in the US to Black women’s bodies. What I have particular qualms with is that, because she does have class privilege, her ethnicity is erased. This implicates to me that Armenians (as well as other ethnic minorities) in the US must satisfy the stereotype of being raised in economically disadvantaged immigrant families (like mine) in order to be fully recognized as ethnic minorities. Symbiotically, this also means that assimilated (and especially wealthy), ethnically ambiguous minorities like West Asians can access white-passing privilege, whereas Black Americans, despite economic status, do not have the privilege to choose being racialized.
The plot twist here is that she’s benefiting from multiple systems of oppression. The media does not know how to racially categorize her. She commodifies and capitalizes off of her ethnic otherness. And she (hopefully) knows this. As a mixed person, she’s the orientalist wet dream, meaning that she’s pre-packaged with ‘exotic’ features typically ascribed to Middle Eastern women, but with lighter skin, wealth, virtual sexual accessibility and no cultural or religious context. And, in a fucked up way, Kim is banking off of being fetishized, racialized, orientalized and objectified.
I want to avoid perpetuating the black-white racial binary while also underscoring the clear anti-blackness at play around her sexual sensationalism. Her success is specifically premised around historical and institutionalized anti-blackness–a success that implies that the US media doesn’t need actual Black women anymore to fill the Black women quota. She resembles and is ‘close enough’ to Western notions of Black women’s physical attributes but isn’t Black. Although her body is clearly fetishized, the primary difference is that it’s is monetized. Sesali B. of Feministing.com expands:
“Kim K [is marketed] to black [women]. Her look is that of the exotic ‘other,’ which we love because we fall for all of the women of color who don’t have too much color. She’s beautiful. Her body is the centerpiece of her media image and much of her fame is credited to the booty behind her–one that is supposed to be found on the back of a black woman. . . Black women don’t get famous from [an uneventful sex tape]. . . She is idolized for being what all of us black girls should want to be.”
As an aside, I do find the above booty statement problematic because although it’s valid in the historical, Western(ized) understanding of and oppressive treatment towards Black women’s bodies, her curves can and are found on the many backs of Armenian women as well.
Kim consented to work with a notably racist photographer without considering the contextual significance of what she’d participated in. Considering her track record, she isn’t the most sensible celebrity and likely assumed she would magically bump her post-birth image as America’s cutting-edge sex symbol. In no way does this excuse those actions. We do expect some sort of accountability from her because she has power. But so long as it is favorable to her social and economic capital gains, she will continue to perpetuate whatever fuckedupness at the cost of her own and others’ oppression.
It is enraging to see these images circulate faster and broader than footage of actual issues: institutionalized violence against Black males and queer, trans people of color in the US; Utah State’s indifference towards a student’s terrorist threat against Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian for her scheduled on-campus lecture; firing tenured professor Steven Salaita for an anti-Zionist tweet; and the approaching centennial of ongoing US and Turkish denial of Ottoman-perpetrated genocide against my people. I am sick of internalizing the careless, decontextualized and authoritative comments that ‘media critics’ have suddenly expressed about the Armenian-American identity experience. I am fucking tired of Kim’s ass taking up space in my body and in my communities. Let’s talk about something else.