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

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 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 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 focusses on 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 television 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 (Routledge).

Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at 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 volume Television for Women: New Directions (Routledge 2012). She is also Editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.