The Wedding Spectacle Across Contemporary Media and Culture: Something Old, Something New

209 Pages·2019·4.903 MB·English

by  Jilly Boyce Kay (editor), Melanie Kennedy (editor), Helen Wood (editor)

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 digitali-
zation, 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 inacritique of the class hierarchiesand rampant inequalities of racialised
heteropatriarchy, this book resists a straightforward dismissal of the mediated wed-
ding spectacle. Instead, the plural feminist perspectives offer (com)passionate
explorations of sites of resistance and ambivalence. They identify themes of iden-
tity, 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

THE WEDDING SPECTACLE
ACROSS CONTEMPORARY
MEDIA AND CULTURE
This 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
intensifyingatatimewhenmarriageasaninstitutionappearstobeindecline–and
they offer new insights into the shifting and complex gender politics of con-
temporary 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 and cultural contexts to explore how the gender politics of
weddings are changing and adapting to a new cultural and social landscape. This
in-depth analysis of the wedding spectacle will appeal to academics and researchers
in the fields of gender and mass media, cultural studies, feminist studies, and
intercultural communication.
Jilly Boyce Kay is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of
Leicester. Her forthcoming book Gender, Media and Voice explores the mediation
of women’s voices and the concept of “communicative injustice”. She has also
published on mediated feminist anger, newspaper representations of the women’s
suffrage movement in Britain and Ireland, reality television, and women’s televi-
sion histories. She is Editor of the Cultural Commons section in the European
Journal of Cultural Studies.
Melanie Kennedy is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of
Leicester. She is the author of Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular
Culture. Her research examines media representations of gendered, age-defined,
classed, raced identities (in particular, tweens, young female celebrities and teenage
mothers), and the popular culture that addresses these subjects. She is the Associate
Editor of Commentary and Criticism for Feminist Media Studies.
Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University.
She has published widely on television, class and audiences, including the books
Talking with Television and Reacting to Reality Television, and the edited collection
Television for Women: New Directions. She is also Editor of the European Journal of
Cultural Studies
THE WEDDING SPECTACLE
ACROSS CONTEMPORARY
MEDIA AND CULTURE
Something Old, Something New
Edited by Jilly Boyce Kay, Melanie Kennedy and
Helen Wood
Firstpublished2020
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CONTENTS
List of figures ix
List of contributors x
Acknowledgements xiii
Abstracts xiv
Something old, something new: The gender politics of the
wedding spectacle 1
Jilly Boyce Kay, Melanie Kennedy and Helen Wood
1 The bride wore dread: Dissent and desire for the wedding
spectacle in Sex and the City, from the box to the big screen 21
Deborah Jermyn
2 Making a spectacle of yourself: British-Asian wedding
videography as alternative archives of belonging 37
Jilly Boyce Kay and Kajal Nisha Patel
3 Weddings, anti-heroines, and postfeminist cynicism 53
Suzanne Leonard
4 Say Yes to the Dress and the affective rhythms of repetition and
reflection 67
Natasha Whiteman and Helen Wood
5 Big Fat Royal Weddings: Kate the “commoner” princess and
classed moral economies 81
Laura Clancy
viii Contents
6 “Time for all of us to walk into the sunshine together”: Glee,
the same-sex wedding spectacle and the imagining of queer
futures 95
Kate McNicholas Smith
7 Tailored for marriage, ready for the stage: Framing Turkey’s
family regime on “The Marriage Show” 109
Feyza Akınerdem
8 Keeping it classy: Wedding dresses and distinction 123
Jenny Thatcher
9 Tailor-made suits and “crappy drag queens”: Constructing gay
and lesbian weddings on British reality TV 141
Michael Lovelock
10 Spectacular virgins: Purity porn and the making uncanny of the
white wedding 155
Melanie Kennedy
11 On blushing brides and the compulsory logics of hetero-
femininity: The glow in transatlantic media culture 171
Brenda R. Weber
Index 185
FIGURES
1.1 The climax to Charlotte’s wedding to Trey captures the women
assembled lovingly together and excludes the groom 27
1.2 Carrie implausibly spinning with delight in a wedding dress at
the Vogue photoshoot 32
4.1 “I’m saying yes” 74
8.1 “Princess” dresses, by artist Leanne Round, 2018 128
8.2 “Contemporary” dresses, by artist Leanne Round, 2018 130
8.3 “Rustic Vintage” dresses, by artist Leanne Round, 2018 131
8.4 “Sophisticated” dresses, by artist Leanne Round, 2018 133