ABSTRACT
Driving from Ithaca to Albany one spring night in 1992 I heard a report on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered about the fact that thirteen TV shows were ending their season with weddings. Ever the alert sociologist, I exclaimed out loud to the radio, “Wow! What’s that all about?” Since I frequently teach courses on social inequality, marriage and family, and women’s studies, I was more than idly curious. In the weeks that followed I watched some of these shows and became conscious of the degree to which weddings —especially white weddings-permeate popular culture. White weddings were not only main fare on situation comedies but were also used to sell everything from antacids to soap. Even when they weren’t the central theme they were inserted into the background. Television, however, was not the only medium in which this trend was visible. The movie industry appeared to be capitalizing on the same theme, particularly after the 1991 success of Father of the Bride, a remake of the classic 1950s version, using weddings as the main theme or as a plot device somewhere in the film. When I turned to research journals for help in understanding what was going on, I was surprised again. While sociologists have produced a significant body of research on marriage, no U.S. sociologist has ever published a study on weddings. In fact, with the exception of a Canadian sociologist who also wonders why
weddings haven’t been studied (Currie 1993), they are rarely examined in any academic discipline. This glaring omission seemed particularly stunning in relation to the pervasiveness of both the practice and its presence in popular culture. I was left with several questions: Why are weddings receiving all this attention from the media? How can they be so present in popular culture yet so absent from scrutiny? Do we take them for granted to such an extent that we don’t notice that they merit study? Or do we understand them to be of so little importance that we assume there is nothing to be learned from studying them? And why white weddings? What is the significance of the white wedding?
