Description
Book SynopsisThis book interrogates the hyper-visibility and stubborn endurance of the wedding spectacle across media and culture in the current climate.
The wide-ranging chapters consider why the symbolic power of weddings is intensifying at a time when marriage as an institution appears to be in decline and they offer new insights into the shifting and complex gender politics of contemporary culture. The collection is a feminist project but does not straight-forwardly renounce the wedding spectacle. Rather, the diverse contributions offer close analyses of the myriad forms and practices of the wedding spectacle, from reality television and cinematic film to wedding videography and bridal boutiques. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, the chapters illuminate the paradoxes, contradictions, disappointments, cruelties and pleasures that are intimately bound up with the wedding spectacle.
Written by leading and emerging feminist scholars, the chapters range across different national
Trade Review
This fascinating collection significantly updates and expands our understanding of the popular cultures of weddings. Analyzing the wedding as a premiere site of spectacle, aspiration and the staging of social intimacy, it also unpacks its digitalization, globalization and complex affects and calls our attention to what we might think of as the growing distance between weddings and marriage.
Diane Negra, Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture, University College Dublin
Grounded in a critique of the class hierarchies and rampant inequalities of racialised heteropatriarchy, this book resists a straightforward dismissal of the mediated wedding spectacle. Instead, the plural feminist perspectives offer (com)passionate explorations of sites of resistance and ambivalence. They identify themes of identity, power, desire, consent, affect, camp, generation, while interrogating the mediated production of intimacies, connectivities and conflicts.
Alison Winch, Lecturer in Media Studies, University of East Anglia
Table of ContentsList of Figures
List of Contributors
Abstracts
Something Old, Something New: The Gender Politics of the Wedding Spectacle
Jilly Boyce Kay, Melanie Kennedy and Helen Wood
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- The Bride Wore Dread: Dissent and Desire for the Wedding Spectacle in Sex and the City, from the Box to the Big-screen
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Deborah Jermyn
- Making a Spectacle of Yourself: British-Asian Wedding Videography as Alternative Archives of Belonging
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Jilly Boyce Kay and Kajal Nisha Patel
- Weddings, Anti-Heroines, and Postfeminist Cynicism
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Suzanne Leonard
- Say Yes to the Dress and the Affective Rhythms of Repetition and Reflection
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Natasha Whiteman and Helen Wood
- Big Fat Royal Weddings: Kate the "Commoner" Princess and Classed Moral Economies
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Laura Clancy
- "Time for all of us to Walk into the Sunshine Together": Glee, Same-sex Wedding Spectacle and the Imagining of Queer Futures
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Kate McNicholas Smith
- Tailored for Marriage, Ready for the Stage: Frames of the Family Regime on "The Marriage Show
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Feyza Akınerdem
- Keeping it Classy: Wedding Dresses and Distinctions
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Jenny Thatcher
- Tailor-made Suits and "Crappy Drag Queens": Constructing Gay and Lesbian Weddings in Reality TV
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Michael Lovelock
- Spectacular Virgins: Purity Porn and the Making Uncanny of the White Wedding
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Melanie Kennedy
- On Blushing Brides and the Compulsory Logics of Hetero-Femininity: The Glow in Transatlantic Media Culture
Brenda R. Weber
Index
