Abstract
In his chapter in The Wedding Spectacle Across Contemporary Media and Culture, Michael Lovelock suggests that contemporary mediated representations of marriage might be understood as occupying a ‘productively ambivalent space’ (p. 151). Interestingly, this succinct theorisation is one that informs and underpins the entirety of this new collection, edited by feminist scholars Jilly Boyce Kay, Melanie Kennedy and Helen Wood.
While the introduction of the book presents the wedding spectacle as existing within the context of ‘disappointment with the heteronormative terms of romantic love’ (p. 3), the overall tone of the collection is one of hopefulness. Each chapter is fundamentally informed by and engaged with the intersectional discourses of gender, class, race, age and sexuality. In addition, the collection continually asserts itself as navigating through and problematising contemporary understandings of postfeminism and neoliberalist societies. Through analyses of mediated wedding narratives that decentralise the heterosexual couple, the book avoids reductive and narrow conceptualisations of the marriage institution and positions itself instead as critical spectator to the wedding spectacle.
The collection offers a subversive space of potential transformation that recentralises alternative relationships forged through the rituals of intensely mediated marriage, such as those between friends and family members. These analyses further complicate existing theorisations of marriage and the ‘wedding industrial complex’ (p. 6) – which tend to suggest that mediated weddings straightforwardly reproduce heteropatriarchal norms – ensuring that the collection acts as an important and timely assessment of these rapidly evolving (and often contradictory) discourses.
While the book is not explicitly organised in this way, I would suggest that each chapter within this collection can be understood as directly engaging with one of four central thematic categories relating to the body: wedding affect and the emotional response; queer futures and the reimagining of gay unions and relationalities; the wedding spectacle and new technologies; and the abject or excessive bridal body. This framework emerged to me as I worked through the collection, with each category I mapped out useful in relation to both my intellectualisation of the shape and direction of the book, and in terms of the coherent creative flow the collection maintains.
In relation to the first thematic category of affect, Deborah Jermyn’s chapter on HBO’s Sex and the City investigates the challenges of small to big-screen adaptations of the wedding spectacle. Incorporating interesting explorations of the disjuncture between the criticism of the television series and the first feature film that followed, Jermyn’s chapter centres on the anxieties surrounding mediated representations of the perpetual consumption and commodification of intimacy and romance, set within the context of the post-2008 financial crisis. This sense of tension is also explored within Feyza Akınerdem’s chapter on the now-cancelled Turkish reality programme Marry Me on the Esra Erol Show. Through interviews conducted with both the show’s participants and staff members (including host Esra Erol herself), Akınerdem offers an important assessment of the ways in which the controversial show perpetuated neoliberal ideologies relating to continual self-improvement, but only within the context of the ‘acceptable’ family unit. Crucially, Akınerdem’s chapter is the only contribution within this collection to engage with non-‘Western’ media, making it a valuable addition to a collection of otherwise Anglo-centric perspectives on mediated weddings. Natasha Whiteman and Helen Wood also engage directly with affect theory within their analysis of the reality television programme Say Yes to the Dress. Through the chapter’s close attention to the almost climactic moment of a bride-to-be choosing the perfect wedding dress, more predictable discussions of the relationship between shopping and the neoliberal pursuit of the perfectly aestheticised self are elided. Instead, Whiteman and Wood replace these discussions with a carefully considered and complex analysis of how the mirror as a device within Say Yes to the Dress not only makes visible both the physical and emotional labour of women and women’s romantic desires, but also offers space for affective reflections of the wedding ‘community’ surrounding these women, which often takes the form of an entourage of family members and friends.
The second key theme animating the collection is that of the reimagining of queer futures, as exemplified by Kate McNicholas Smith and Michael Lovelock in their respective chapters. Contextualised against the paradoxical rise in acceptance towards and simultaneous suppression of LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and others) identities and rights in the United States over the last decade, McNicholas Smith utilises musical comedy-drama series Glee to argue for a ‘queer futurity’ that reimagines marriage as a versatile institution of ‘messy contradictions’ (p. 102). Similar contradictions are also explored within Lovelock’s chapter, which examines mediated representations of gay marriage in a UK context, analysing reality show Don’t Tell the Bride in order to interrogate the ways in which homosexual romance is ‘rendered acceptable’ by mainstream media platforms (p. 145).
In relation to the third category (that of the role of new technologies in the wedding spectacle), Jilly Boyce Kay and Kajal Nisha Patel examine British-Asian wedding spectacles amid modern theorisations of romantic couples as potential wedding auteurs. Integral to this chapter are mediated narratives of bodies belonging, with the authors interrogating the ideas of the ‘bride as brand’ (p. 7) and the ‘digital congregation’ (p. 4). In theorising wedding ceremonies as imbued with the challenge of catering to the contemporary social media audience, this chapter explores the tensions that exist between the re-presentation and problematisation of motifs of British colonialism in British-Asian wedding videography. The final chapter of the collection by Brenda R. Weber also engages with discourses of marriage and new technologies in relation to theorisations of the bridal ‘glow’ (p. 171). Interestingly, Weber’s interrogation of the sublime within makeover programming is inherently connected to contemporary social media discourses surrounding the so-called Instagram ‘glo-up’. 1 This trend (which engages with postfeminist, neoliberalist ideologies of endless self-improvement) centres specifically on women who undergo their bodily ‘transformations’ in private before posting images to social media sites in order to demonstrate their commitment to the acceptably feminised self via their new ‘look’. Through an analysis of the US reality series Bridalplasty, wherein female contestants are presented as ‘wounded soldiers on the battlefield’ (p. 174), Weber also briefly engages with the final key theme that I think emerges from the collection, namely, the abject and excessive bridal body.
The abject and excessive bridal body is first explored in this collection within Suzanne Leonard’s chapter centred on the ‘ugly feelings’ underpinning female-centred comedies such as Bride Wars (dir. Gary Winick, USA, 2009) and Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig, USA, 2011). Leonard examines the ways in which weddings are presented as catalysts that are able to fracture even the strongest of female friendships as a result of the postfeminist sense of competition that marriage inspires, and hers is the first chapter within the collection to initiate some discussion of the role of fat 2 bodies within the wedding spectacle. However, this discussion is quickly abandoned in favour of an analysis of the comedic aspects of the performance of female bodily excess more generally. Laura Clancy’s chapter also offers an interesting discussion of abject brides within her comparison of the BBC’s televisual coverage of the Royal Wedding between Kate Middleton and Prince William, and the parodic representation of this moment within Channel 4’s satirical series The Windsors. Clancy expertly argues that because the latter programme explicitly presents the racialised White working-class bridal body as threatening and disgusting, it positions itself as ‘punching down’ in a manner that reinforces the classed and gendered order of patriarchal hegemony. This idea of ‘punching down’ is also identifiable within Jenny Thatcher’s ethnographic research centring on high-end bridal boutiques, as presented within the latter half of the edited collection. Through an analysis of postfeminist ‘choiceoisie’ attitudes, Thatcher demonstrates the ways in which the hierarchical value of differently classed bodies informs women’s choices as they undertake the important cultural rite of finding and purchasing the perfect wedding dress (Probyn, 1997). In acknowledging that most bridal boutiques do not offer dresses above a UK size 12, Thatcher assesses thinness as a classed marker of social distinction, which is extremely revealing in relation to understanding mediated representations of the un/acceptable bridal bodies that are and are not welcome within the contemporary wedding spectacle. This idea of abject bridal bodies is most specifically invoked in relation to Melanie Kennedy’s chapter focusing on ‘purity porn’ and the uncanny spectacularisation of father–daughter ‘purity balls’ in the United States. With descriptions reminiscent of The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter, Kennedy explores the ways in which ‘purity balls’ contain the capacity to both affirm the patriarchal order and disrupt it through uncanny caricatures of the family unit.
As the foundational ideas of this collection centre on an inquiry into discourses of visibility and invisibility, the book elicits valuable questions around whose bodies the ‘wedding spectacle’ makes visible and (perhaps more importantly) whose bodies are industrially and aesthetically excluded. The collection briefly entertains several important issues that would make for fruitful future research. For instance, several chapters acknowledge the importance of ‘thin privilege’ in relation to theorisations of class and femininity in marriage, without providing any in-depth discussions of representations of fat bodies within the wedding spectacle. The collection also explores the impact of marriage and the wedding spectacle on familial units. However, the texts analysed are predominantly Anglo-centric and investigations of non-‘Western’ media formats are largely uninterrogated. These avenues of exploration would prove to be particularly fascinating as they would require an engagement with alternative theorisations of gender roles, familial relationships and community that would potentially result in very different imaginings and understandings of wedding spectacles altogether. Overall, through the reinterpretation and application of a diverse range of theoretical and epistemological approaches, the collection undoubtedly delivers on the promise of ‘something old, something new’ and acts as an excellent introduction to modern debates around cultural representations of marriage and weddings in the media.
