First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics

With the prominence of one-name couples (Brangelina, Kimye) and famous families (the Smiths, the Beckhams), it is becoming increasingly clear that celebrity is no longer an individual pursuit—if it ever was. Accordingly, First Comes Love explores celebrity kinship and the phenomenon of the power couple: those relationships where two stars come together and where their individual identities as celebrities become inseparable from their status as a famous twosome. Taken together, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways these alliances are bound up in wider cultural debates about marriage, love, intimacy, family, parenthood, sexuality, and gender, in their particular historical contexts, from the 1920s to the present day. Interdisciplinary in scope, First Comes Love seeks to establish how celebrity relationships play particular roles in dramatizing, disrupting, and reconciling often-contradictory ideas about coupledom and kinship formations.

Shelley Cobb is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. She led the AHRC-funded project Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary Film Culture in the UK and is the author of Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (2014) and co-editor of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics (Bloomsbury, 2015). She has published widely on the film industry, women and popular culture, gender, and celebrity.

Neil Ewen is Senior Lecturer and Head of Communications at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the co-editor of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics (Bloomsbury, 2015), Capitalism, Crime and Media in the 21st Century (2021), and special issues of Television and New Media on the TV show Friends (2018) and Celebrity Studies on populist political celebrities in contemporary Europe (2020). He is Cultural Report section editor of the journal Celebrity Studies.