ABSTRACT
Feminists consider wedding culture because of the ways it renders and restricts women’s roles, especially its articulation of the position of the bride and her normative gender, sexuality, and life trajectory. The cultural construction of the groom and his correlation with masculinity should be of interest to feminists because these prescribed identities contribute to conceptions of normative unions and related notions of acceptable bodies, characteristics, and behaviors. Heterosexual men, including the individuals considered earlier in this book, are often encouraged to resist weddings and to see unions with women and the production of children as challenges to their normative and unrestrained masculinity. This chapter analyzes how heterosexual men are figured on Internet sites and forums for grooms. These online settings are less common than wedding sites that address women but they are depicted as necessary for men’s parity and rights. Nevertheless, brides often constitute the groom in these forums and envision men performing the kinds of grooming and cosmetic practices studied in Chapter 3. This chapter introduces the term “wedding masculinity” as a way of suggesting how masculinity is correlated with and distanced from weddings. The term also indicates how narratives about weddings wed, or combine, multiple masculinities and other gender identities.
