What if the tragedy of Michael Jackson was never merely celebrity, but a lifetime spent laboring beneath the intertwined theologies of patriarchy, performance, and profit?
Finally saw the MICHAEL film today (5/16/26) after much ambivalence about the retelling of this story again. Especially in Michael’s physical absence. But Antoine Fuqua is a fantastic director and I didn’t want to kiss the opportunity to see his work either.
My homegirl, the resident film & movie buff of our group chat earned me that this in film “ They highlight reel a lot to focus on Michael vs Joe.” And I did notice that as true. Which I feel is appropriate in a way. Because it finally stops praising Joe as a determined patriarch. But a harmful iron fist.
One of the under-discussed realities of patriarchal family systems is how often children become: labor infrastructure, retirement plans, legacy vehicles, and unrealized ambition made flesh.
Joseph Jackson kept pumping Katherine full of children to profit himself. Katherine was pregnant for 9 consecutive years and if it hadn’t produced the Jackson 5 we might call that reproductive abuse.
I just can’t ignore that Katherine’s body became part of the production infrastructure too.
Had the labor extracted from those births not resulted in extraordinary wealth and fame, we might more readily recognize the coercive dimensions of such relentless reproductive expectation.
So I think we oughta discuss how many men have done this and why it makes women’s control of their reproductive health so important.
The Family as Production Infrastructure
If we reframe the Jackson narrative away from “gifted family mythology” and back toward labor extraction, gendered bodily cost, and economic dependency…
We can better understand why it matters that Keith Lee said his wife decides the number of children they have. That is a man engaging fatherhood as stewardship and partnership rather than as domination/resource extraction.
Especially since it’s evident Keith Lee is a man working his own talents for profit rather than depending on the exploitation of his children. An MMA fighter who took responsibility of changing his family’s wealth status rather than leaving them beleaguered under the ending of one career. He led them into security by turning to his other talents, becoming a notable food influencer and philanthropist.
The Patriarchal Family Structure Is Inherently Religious
As a public theologian, I promise that I’m not out of my depth in this analysis. The Patriarchal Family Structure is inherently religious. The devotion of the Jackson family as Jehovah’s Witnesses is not a side note to ignore in the formation of how we got here. And once you see that, the entire Jackson family story stops reading as merely “stage parent pushes talented children” and starts reading as a theology of order, authority, sacrifice, and dominion.
High-control religious structures often sanctify: patriarchal authority, obedience, reproductive expectation, bodily discipline, suppression of individuality, and suffering as virtue.
Joe’s control isn’t merely personal pathology. It’s culturally and religiously reinforced masculinity.
We thought Michael constantly fucking with his nose was self hate. I think a better psychological understanding is that Mike kept changing his nose because it was the most prominent feature of his father.
I’d reckon instead that the surgeries were never just vanity but an attempted severance, maybe even self-erasure and escape from inherited masculinity. That’s a heavy ship to steer.
Theology Embedded Into Domestic Life
Fundamentally I believe that patriarchy itself functions liturgically, even if not overtly religious. The fathers as moral authorities, mothers as sacrificial vessels, children as legacy/property, obedience as righteousness, rebellion as sin, and discipline as salvation.
That’s theology embedded into domestic life. So Michael Jackson’s story becomes not just celebrity tragedy or Black excellence under pressure. It’s also a story about religiously sanctified control. Of masculinity and ownership, bodily alienation, performance as worthiness, and the collapse of selfhood under patriarchal spectacle.
And under thepatriarchal family systems of child labor infrastructure, it occurs to me that Joe Jackson literally worked Michael’s talent to his profit until his death. Michael didn’t stop laboring in death. Not his own or Joe’s.
Michael Jackson has became one of the clearest examples of a human being transformed into perpetual economic machinery.
Even death did not free him from production. The body kept generating catalog revenue, image licensing, documentaries, conspiracy economies, estate wars, nostalgia circuits, tribute performances, streaming spikes, cultural discourse, and inherited family wealth structures.
The labor never ended. That’s the theology of capitalism. Under which even the sainted body that must continue producing miracles after death.
And because Michael’s labor began in childhood, it creates this horrifying continuity.
The child body performs, the adult body deteriorates, where the burned, scarred, and surgically altered body becomes spectacle, until the dead body becomes archive commodity.
Useful Children
Joe helped architect a family structure where children’s giftedness became extractable communal capital. A system operated under patriarchal religious logic, so now even sacrifice gets moralized. Suffering is baptized into the divine order of what fathers do in providing for the family and building legacy.
The children become beloved only for their utility. It’s why even with third degree burns, nerve damage, and an ICU stay Joe Jackson’s concern falls to the potential loss of Michael’s utility.
Because useful children in patriarchal systems are often loved most intensely when they produce most efficiently.
Katherine’s Quiet Theology of Endurance
I also can’t help but wonder the emotional toil of Katherine watching her children’s abuse analogous to her own.
Katherine is often narratively flattened into passive mother, devout wife, quiet witness, or protective softness against Joe’s hardness.
But I witness Katherine’s quiet strength enough to restore the tragedy of her position inside patriarchal system. I honor that her own subordination may have constrained her ability to stop what was happening to her children.
My grace understands that Katherine may have been conditioned to interpret endurance as righteousness, obedience as holiness, suffering as duty, and family preservation as divine responsibility.
So then watching the children suffer becomes psychologically unbearable because it mirrors the structure of her own life.
Her abuse may not have looked like Michael’s, but the underlying structural control, bodily expectation, suppression of selfhood, religious obedience, endurance without escape, and utility within patriarchal order all remain for her too.
The tragedy is not merely that Michael Jackson was worked like machinery.
It is that generations of people watched it happen and called it greatness. Because that’s what capitalism’s theology raised us to see as the favor of God made manifest.
Somewhere beneath the weight of patriarchal ambition, religious obedience, and capitalist hunger, a child kept performing until there was almost nothing left of him outside the performance itself.
Maybe that is the great tragedy of patriarchal systems built on extraction. They leave very little room for anybody inside them to simply be human.
Not the mother whose body becomes production infrastructure. Not even the father conditioned to confuse domination with provision.
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