ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter sets out many of the prevailing ideas about wedding culture, explains the rise and rise of the wedding spectacle, the curious paradoxes that it raises, and our intensifying attachments to its cultures and imagery. While acknowledging the importance of a political economy approach, the chapter revisits ideas about spectacle, to argue for sustained feminist analyses of the practices of the wedding spectacle in order to understand its tenacity in times of austerity, and while there is declining need for marriage as an institution. The chapter argues for staying with the wedding spectacle’s troubling ambivalences and returns to feminist cultural studies’ ideas about pleasure to explore our affective attachments to the wedding spectacle in a context of disappointment with the heteronormative terms of romantic love. The chapter includes summaries of the other chapters in the book and concludes with our contention that an interrogation of the wedding spectacle might be useful precisely because it helps to make visible our more complex desires.
