Kardashian Nation Work in America’s Klan is Lofton’s discourse on the Kardashian family as a contemporary new media phenomenon in the American socio-cultural field. It starts with a preface about the Melissa Click incident and ends with a defensive speech about her. From the viewpoints of readers who are not sociologists and those with knowledge of the social sciences, this chapter section looks more like a resentment stream of thought or even a rant. The author demonstrates a novel academic problem which is the conventional public conviction that popular culture and modern media are not serious scholarly fields unworthy of attention, effort, and funding (Lofton, 2017). However, the overly emotional way of formulating ideas and the chosen incident ruin the subject of consistency and create dissonance in readers from the beginning of the chapter.
The analytical section on the Kardashian family, which takes up most of the textual space of the chapter, is much better executed than the preface about Click that preceded it. Lofton (2017) masterfully analyzes and links diverse sociological topics of pop culture, media channels, family and clan structures, race relations, and ethnic inheritance to Kardashians and makes their inferences, hypotheses, and refutations. For example, the writer claims that “the definition of their family is the definition of their bodies” (Lofton, 2017, p. 169). Another interesting observation is the social impact of human phenotype and genotype on the degree and nature of media popularity. The analysis of the duality and interconnectedness of love and hatred as two prevailing types of social media reactions to Kardashians and other celebrities is also fascinating (Lofton, 2017). This chapter discusses and reveals things beyond the well-known Armenian-American family, such as the transformation of family ties into clan ones when being noticed by the public eye, and it is its major strength.
Reference
Lofton, K. (2017). Consuming religion. University of Chicago Press.