There is a strange thing happening in the Kardashian family that becomes much easier to see once you stop looking at the Kardashians as a collection of individual celebrities and start looking at them as a social structure.
Jonathan Van Meter’s Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future makes much of the fact that Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner and Kris Jenner constitute something historically unusual: an enormously wealthy, enormously influential American family organized around women. Van Meter calls it a matriarchy.
But “matriarchy” may not quite capture what is most radical about it.
The Kardashians have not merely created a family in which women are powerful. They have created a family in which men appear increasingly optional to the functioning of the family itself.
That is a rather different proposition.
Look at the physical geography of Kardashian life. The family has accumulated enormous homes in the same small orbit around Calabasas and Hidden Hills. The houses are spectacularly large, but the distance between them is comparatively small. The effect is less like a collection of independent nuclear families and more like an extended family compound, a contemporary American version of an aristocratic estate.
The children can move between households. Cousins grow up together. Sisters remain intensely involved in one another’s lives. Grandmother, mothers, aunts and cousins form a dense network of childcare, emotional support, socialization and wealth. The family does not have to be recreated every time one marriage ends.
That last point is crucial.
The conventional American family is remarkably dependent on the stability of the heterosexual couple. Two adults meet, marry or cohabit, have children, establish a household, and organize their lives around that household. When the couple breaks apart, the family structure is supposed to break apart with it.
The Kardashian system doesn’t really work that way.
The marriages and relationships can dissolve while the family remains almost completely intact.
Men enter the Kardashian story with extraordinary prominence and then, often, extraordinary impermanence. Robert Kardashian was central to the family’s early history. Caitlyn Jenner was central to the children’s childhood. Kanye West was obviously central to Kim’s adult life and the father of her four children. Kourtney, Khloé, Kylie and Kris have all had relationships that mattered enormously to them personally.
But none of those men is the indispensable center of the Kardashian family.
Kris is.
And then there are the daughters, who reproduce and extend the structure.
This is part of what makes the family so interesting as a social experiment. The men can leave without taking the family with them.
Kris Jenner’s achievement, in this sense, is considerably more interesting than the familiar “momager” story suggests. She didn’t simply turn her children into celebrities. She built an economic and social system in which the family itself became the institution.
That distinction matters.
The traditional patriarchal family tends to organize itself around the father’s household. The father’s income, name, property and authority provide the center around which everyone else is arranged. Even when the mother performs enormous amounts of unpaid labor, the family is conventionally imagined as belonging to the husband and wife, with the husband occupying the structurally privileged position.
The Kardashian family reverses this.
The daughters retain their relationships with one another regardless of who they are dating. Their businesses are their own. Their wealth is their own. Their homes are their own. Their public identities are their own. Their children remain connected to their maternal relatives regardless of what happens with the children’s fathers.
And perhaps most importantly, the family’s emotional center is not a husband.
It is the network of women.
This is why the Kardashian fascination with enormous houses is more revealing than it initially appears. These aren’t simply monuments to individual wealth. They facilitate proximity. They make the extended family physically possible.
The family’s extraordinary wealth allows something that ordinary families increasingly struggle to afford: several generations living close together while maintaining separate households.
The result resembles a kind of capitalist feudalism, except that the ruling house is overwhelmingly female.
The comparison to aristocratic families is not completely frivolous. Van Meter himself has described the Kardashians as resembling one of Britain’s traditional dynastic families, pointing to their enormous houses, constant movement between them, their shared bubble and even their Christmas portraits.
But the Kardashian version has a peculiar modernity.
The old aristocratic family existed to preserve property, lineage and status through generations. The Kardashian family does something similar, except its primary assets are attention, brands, media visibility and human relationships.
The family itself is the brand.
And women are the principal carriers of that brand.
This is where the feminist implications become complicated.
The Kardashians are not particularly attractive figures to much of mainstream feminism. They are associated with conspicuous consumption, extreme beauty standards, sexualized self-presentation, cosmetic enhancement, wealth inequality and the commodification of the female body. Kim Kardashian’s famous declaration that people simply need to “get up and work” has been criticized as an emblem of billionaire obliviousness to the conditions experienced by ordinary workers.
None of those criticisms disappear because the family happens to be female-led.
But there is an odd blind spot in the way the Kardashians are usually discussed.
Their femininity is so visible that their institutional feminism is almost invisible.
We look at Kim’s body, her clothes, her relationships, her marriages, her divorces and her sexual image. We look at the men around her. We ask whether she is empowering women or participating in their objectification.
We don’t always look at the thing she has built around herself.
That thing is remarkably independent of men.
Kim’s relationship with Kanye West is perhaps the clearest example. West was, at various points, one of the most culturally powerful men on earth. Yet his disappearance from Kim’s household did not dissolve her household. Her career did not collapse. Her businesses did not collapse. Her relationship with her sisters did not collapse. Her children did not cease to belong to the Kardashian family. The maternal infrastructure remained.
The divorce was a personal catastrophe in many respects, but it was not an institutional catastrophe.
That is a profound difference.
In the conventional family imagination, divorce threatens the family itself. In the Kardashian imagination, divorce is something that happens inside the family.
The family is bigger than the marriage.
And this may be the most genuinely radical thing about the Kardashian phenomenon.
They have managed to separate motherhood from dependence on a husband.
Not perfectly, obviously. Their children’s fathers remain important. The family is not literally “post-men.” Nor are the Kardashians some egalitarian feminist commune. They are billionaires operating within one of the most aggressively commercialized forms of capitalism imaginable.
But they have achieved something that feminist theory has spent decades imagining: women possessing enough economic resources, familial solidarity and institutional power that a relationship with a man is no longer necessary for the continuity of the household.
The distinction between “having a man” and “needing a man” becomes enormous at this level of wealth.
And it is wealth that makes the experiment possible.
A working-class single mother cannot easily reproduce the Kardashian arrangement. She cannot necessarily buy a mansion five minutes from her sisters, employ childcare, maintain several households and construct a family economy around female relatives. The Kardashian version of female independence depends heavily on capital.
That is why calling it a feminist utopia requires an enormous qualification.
It is a feminist utopia under capitalism.
The Kardashian solution to the problems historically associated with women’s dependence on men is not the abolition of property or the redistribution of care. It is the accumulation of enough private property to make dependence unnecessary.
Instead of dismantling the system, they have become exceptionally good at winning it.
This is where Citizen Kim becomes more interesting than a biography of a celebrity might initially sound. The book’s larger argument is that Kim did not merely become famous. She helped create a new form of celebrity in which attention itself could be converted into capital, and capital could then be reinvested into personal autonomy.
But perhaps the ultimate Kardashian asset isn’t Kim’s individual attention.
It is the family’s collective attention.
They have spent decades turning proximity to one another into content. Their arguments become television. Their pregnancies become television. Their houses become television. Their businesses become television. Their relationships become television. Even the process of writing a biography about Kim has become another episode in the family story, with Kris reportedly reacting angrily to the book’s excavation of the family’s history.
The family doesn’t simply live together.
It produces itself together.
This is why the Kardashian children may be more important to understanding the system than the Kardashian husbands.
The daughters are not merely siblings. They are nodes in a reproductive and economic network. Their children are cousins to one another. Their businesses intersect. Their houses cluster geographically. Their mothers, aunts and grandmother remain involved. The next generation is therefore born into an already functioning female-centered institution.
The family doesn’t need to start over with every generation.
It compounds.
That is an unusually powerful form of social organization.
And it is one reason the Kardashian family’s apparent obsession with beauty can obscure what is actually happening.
The Kardashians have perfected an extraordinarily old-fashioned female strategy, making themselves desirable to men, while simultaneously achieving an extraordinarily modern result, making themselves independent of men.
The contradiction is the point.
They can participate enthusiastically in the male gaze without organizing their lives around male approval.
They can marry men without making marriage the foundation of their economic existence.
They can have children with men without constructing their entire family around the children’s fathers.
They can break up with men without losing the institution that matters most.
The men come and go.
The sisters remain.
That is why “post-men” is perhaps a more interesting description of the Kardashian family than “matriarchy.”
A matriarchy implies that women have taken the traditional place of men. But the Kardashians aren’t simply reproducing patriarchy with women at the top. They have built something more lateral: a dense network of mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts and cousins whose relationships remain structurally important regardless of the romantic relationships happening around them.
The men aren’t necessarily excluded.
They’re just no longer foundational.
And perhaps this is why the Kardashian phenomenon has been so difficult to categorize politically. Their aesthetic is hyper-feminine, but their family structure is strangely post-patriarchal. Their politics can be irritatingly conventional, while their private organization represents a genuinely unusual departure from conventional family life. Their wealth is obscene, but that wealth has allowed them to solve, in a very narrow and highly unequal way, a problem that feminism has spent a century describing: how can women construct lives that do not depend on the permanence of a man?
The Kardashians’ answer is almost comically simple.
Get rich.
Buy houses near your sisters.
Raise your children together.
Build businesses that belong to you.
And make sure that when the men leave, the family stays.
It is difficult to call that a feminist utopia without adding several asterisks. It is profoundly unequal. It is consumerist. It depends on enormous amounts of inherited and accumulated wealth. It exists inside, rather than outside, capitalism. And the family continues to reproduce some of the most intense beauty and gender pressures in contemporary culture.
But perhaps the point is precisely that the Kardashian family offers a glimpse of what female independence might look like when it is finally given an unlimited capitalist budget.
Not women replacing men.
Not women rejecting men.
Something stranger.
A family in which women have become the permanent institution, and men have become optional participants.
Post-men, perhaps.
Not because there are no men in the picture, but because the picture no longer falls apart when they leave.