Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture

The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture

Freeman, Elizabeth

Paperback

Series: Series Q

Literary CriticismGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0822329891
ISBN13: 9780822329893
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Oct 31 2002
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 8.70
Language: English
In The Wedding Complex Elizabeth Freeman explores the significance of the wedding ceremony by asking what the wedding becomes when you separate it from the idea of marriage. Freeman finds that weddings--as performances, fantasies, and rituals of transformation--are sites for imagining and enacting forms of social intimacy other than monogamous heterosexuality. Looking at the history of Anglo-American weddings and their depictions in American literature and popular culture from the antebellum era to the present, she reveals the cluster of queer desires at the heart of the wedding complex--longings not for marriage necessarily but for public forms of attachment, ceremony, pageantry, and celebration.

Freeman draws on queer theory and social history to focus on a range of texts where weddings do not necessarily lead to legal marriage but instead reflect yearnings for intimate arrangements other than long-term, state-sanctioned, domestic couplehood. Beginning with a look at the debates over gay marriage, she proceeds to consider literary works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edgar Allan Poe, along with such Hollywood films as Father of the Bride, The Graduate, and The Godfather. She also discusses less well-known texts such as Su Friedrich's experimental film First Comes Love and the off-Broadway, interactive dinner play Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All