Recently, I bought a deck of Celebrity Goddess Tarot Cards to give as a gift to a friend. The cards are illustrated by artist Faye Orlove, and they present the twenty-two figures of the Major Arcana as female celebrities and pop cultural characters, a matching of archetype to archetype. Law & Order: SVU’s Olivia Benson is Justice; Katherine Hepburn is Judgment; Miley Cyrus is Death. Orlove also sells prayer candles that style Kim Kardashian as The Saint of Self-Confidence, and a pack of pale pink buttons emblazoned with labels like bitch, narcissist, feminist and fame whore.

Celebrities are our pantheon, these works argue, and their stories are our collective cultural myths.

This mash-up of the cultural, religious and spiritual has come to define the style of what’s often called internet feminism: A heterogenous post-wave attitude perhaps best encapsulated by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca, who asserted that an interest in thigh high boots and national politics are “not mutually exclusive.” This version of feminism, most visible on Twitter and Tumblr, tends to be grounded in theory but built for life outside of the academy. It’s a practical, personal, insistently stylish ethos that’s produced writing from the more trite (think coffee mug slogans) to well-wrought essays and now, increasingly, books.

Two recent examples are Alana Massey’s collection All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to be Famous Strangers, and Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why. As a generation of writers and theorists raised equally by popular culture and feminist critique come of age, they’ve begun to create their own cultural canon. The iconic figures in their lives are given the status of traditional religious icons, and they levy academic-style critique, often refined in graduate programs, at the text of TMZ articles. For these writers, to put Kim Kardashian on a candle is not to raise her up but to make explicit how we already see her. To discuss her tweets as seriously as we might a religious text is not out of the question.

Doyle and Massey aren’t interested in sainthood, though, or at least not the kind the church recognizes. Their subjects are familiar to us, mostly as sinners and troublemakers, women whose complications are taken for contradictions, and whose expressions of pain are mocked as self-indulgent and pathetic. Both books include extended meditations on the lives of figures as diverse as Courtney Love and Sylvia Plath, alongside Lana del Rey, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj.

Celebrities are our pantheon, these works argue, and their stories are our collective cultural myths. Since we spend hours and years of our lives absorbing them, when we talk about them, why not take them seriously? And if we don’t see our personal canon among the figures that the culture keeps telling us are iconic, what’s to stop us from claiming space for our own icons among their ranks?