The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Series Q)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
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.
Offering bold new ways to imagine attachment and belonging, and the public performance and recognition of social intimacy, The Wedding Complex is a major contribution to American studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.
--This text refers to the
Library Binding
edition.
From the Publisher
"The Wedding Complex by Elizabeth Freeman is an extremely original and important work. Freeman takes a distinctly new and different approach to American canonical texts, asking what forms of belonging and desire they produce outside of normative marital unions. For Freeman, the wedding produces and imagines social and cultural relations and kinship forms even as the heterosexual marriage erases these other modes of desire."—Judith Halberstam, University of California, San Diego
"Elizabeth Freeman’s The Wedding Complex performs a crucial scholarly and public service—disentangling the messy, expansive, uncontainable work of the wedding from the normative regulation of the law of marriage. This book is sharp, funny, and deeply significant to current understandings of what is at stake in what are reductively called ‘the marriage debates.’ A must-read for activists and policy makers as well as across the disciplines."—Lisa Duggan, author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity
--This text refers to the
Library Binding
edition.
The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Series Q)
The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Series Q),Elizabeth Freeman,Duke University Press,0822329891,20th century,American - General,American fiction,Gay Studies,History and criticism,Literature - Classics / Criticism,Popular Culture - General,Same-sex marriage,Social Science,Sociology,Sociology - Marriage & Family,United States,Weddings in literature
The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Series Q)
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