White Weddings
Romancing Heterosexuality
in
Popular Culture,
2nd edition
Focus of this book
• Objective: to examine the institutionalization
of heterosexuality through the operation of the
traditional white wedding.
• To explicate the underlying social, economic,
and cultural patterns of current wedding
trends to determine how heterosexuality is
institutionalized.
• Definition: A white wedding is a spectacle
featuring a bride in a formal white wedding
gown, combined with some combination of
attendants, religious ceremony, and wedding
reception.
• Integrally linked to marriage, weddings provide
an important cultural site for understanding
the organization of heterosexuality.
Lifting the veil
• Until recently weddings have been
overlooked by researchers.
• Why do weddings receive so much
attention from the media?
• How could they be so present in popular
culture yet so absent from academic
scrutiny?
• Do we take them so much for granted that
we don’t think that they merit study?
• What exactly is the significance of the
white wedding?
Lifting the veil
• Wedding culture and the wedding industry
provide clues to the larger social interests
they serve.
• They provide a rich source of data about how
we give meaning to heterosexuality and marriage.
• White weddings are a concentrated site for the
operation and reproduction of organized
heterosexuality.
• More so than other prominent heterosexual
practices or rituals, weddings are culturally
pervasive, symbolically prolific, are rarely
questioned or examined.
• They are so taken for granted that they seem
naturally occurring and function to institutionalize
a host of heterosexual behaviors that are, in fact,
socially produced.
One is NOT born a bride!
• One is not born a bride or with the
desire to become a bride …
• Yet, we have an abundance of evidence
that shows that many people believe
otherwise.
• From the moment we enter the world,
culture works to install meaning
systems about everything from sex to
gender to social class to ethnicity to
sexual identity.
• Heterosexuality, whether naturally
occurring or chosen, is organized by
those meanings.
Weddings marriage
• Entry point to the institution of marriage.
• Enactment of institutionalized heterosexuality.
• Weddings are rituals. They have the capacity
to organize larger social arrangements and to
reflect dominant and non-dominant beliefs.
• The recent same sex marriage debates are
really about state-sanctioned and legalized
marriage or who should receive federal and
state marriage entitlements.
Heterosexuality as
institution
• Typically studied as a form of sexuality,
heterosexuality is a highly organized social
institution that varies across culture, history,
region, religion, ethnicity, nationality, race,
lifespan, and social class.
• Sociologically, heterosexuality as an
“established order made up of rule-bound and
standardized behavior patterns” qualifies as an
institution.
• Heterosexuality as an “arrangement involving
large numbers of people whose behavior is
guided by norms and rules” is also a social
institution.
Heterosexuality as
institution
• Heterosexuality is much more than a biological
given or the fact that someone is or is not
attracted to someone of the other sex.
• Our sexual orientation or sexual identity is
defined by the symbolic order of that world
through the use of verbal as well as non-verbal
language.
• How we come to understand what it means to
be heterosexual is a product of ruling interests,
a culture’s symbolic order, and its organizing
practices.
Heterosexuality as
institution
• As is the case with most institutions, people
who participate in these practices must be
socialized to do so.
• Historically, weddings have served as one of
the major events that signal the readiness of
heterosexuals for membership in marriage as
an organizing structure for the institution of
heterosexuality.
• How this is achieved is the focus of the
wedding industry.
The wedding industry
• According to recent studies, the price tag for
the average wedding has increased by 38
percent in the past 15 years.
• With most textile manufacturing occurring outside
the U.S., the labor costs to produce wedding
apparel have decreased dramatically at the same
time that the price of the average wedding gown
has doubled.
• Coupled with a decrease in the number of
weddings performed annually, these conditions
have contributed to an increase in costs for the
consumer.
• The wedding market is increasingly targeting
upper-level income groups or encouraging a
significant level of wedding debt among lower
income groups for what has become a
compulsory ritual.
The wedding industry
• The annual number of marriages has
decreased.
• The wedding industry has changed its
marketing strategies to accommodate this
change.
• One strategy is market diversification:
weddings are no longer confined to the
“Bride” pages of local and national
newspapers, instead, they have become a
mainstay of American popular and consumer
culture.
• In everything from wedding toys to bride and
groom oven mitts, the wedding market now
reaches into nearly every facet of American
culture.
The wedding industry
• Mainstay of American popular and consumer
culture
• Network and cable TV sitcoms and dramas
• Soap operas
• Reality TV
• Media magazines
• Celebrity magazines
• Toys
• Films
• Web sites
• Embedded advertising
• Daytime TV shows
Setting the context
• Why have researchers overlooked the study
of heterosexuality as an institution and its
installation through practices such as
weddings?
• One explanation is the risk involved in such
an examination. Efforts to critically examine
sacred or valued practices, rituals, and
institutions are frequently resisted. Readers
often apply suppressionary strategies by
reacting to such discussions as personal
attacks on themselves or on heterosexuals as
a group rather than see them as institutional
analyses or inventories.
Setting the context
• As activists in the nineteenth century
discovered, to critically examine
heterosexuality’s rules and norms was to
encounter either legal or social sanction.
• “Heterosexuality” as a term or concept was not
coined until 1868 and, at that time, defined
heterosexuality as sexual perversion.
• Without an adequate term for their campaign,
these reformers focused on marriage.
Setting the context
• As part of the free thinker movement, marriage
reform activists dedicated themselves to the
elimination of church and state control over
marriage, arguing that under these rules
marriage was a form of “sexual slavery.”
• When they attempted to distribute their ideas,
they were frequently arrested, and convicted
for mailing “obscene” materials through the U.S.
Postal Service.
• To mail writings on “sex education, birth control,
or abortion” was deemed by U.S. Postal Code
1461—the Comstock Act of 1872—as the
dissemination of obscenity and a federal
offense.
Setting the context
History—nineteenth-century examples:
• First and most famous was the
censorship of Ezra Heywood’s
published treatise, Cupid’s Yokes in
1876.
• Heywood critiqued marriage as a form
of legalized prostitution, arguing that
women, as the property of men, were
forced to provide sexual and
reproductive services in exchange for
economic support and security.
• This powerful tract was widely
distributed and censored twice.
Setting the context
• Second, and equally important—Moses
Harman, publisher of a free thinker
newspaper, printed a letter from a reader
documenting the death of a woman who
had been raped by her husband
immediately following childbirth.
• Because she was the man’s wife, no legal
action was taken against him. The husband
escaped punishment, but Harman’s
newspaper was impounded and he was
sentenced to prison for publishing the
letter.
Setting the context
• Marital rape was a problem being addressed by
several individuals during this period. Uneducated
about sexual intercourse, many young brides were
traumatized by the experience.
• With the rise of the medical profession, social
reformers began publishing books and articles
addressed to young women, educating them about
sex.
• Ida Craddock published and distributed through the
mail a small book called The Wedding Night. But
having already served one sentence under
horrendous prison conditions, Craddock chose death
as less traumatic than prison when she was
prosecuted the second time.
• A strong activist, Craddock sent her suicide letter to a
New York City newspaper laying out the issues as she
saw them.
Setting the context
• Late-twentieth-century feminists such as the Furies
Collective, Redstockings, Rita Mae Brown (1976), and
Charlotte Bunch (1975) challenged dominant notions
of heterosexuality as naturally occurring and argued
that it is instead a highly organized social institution
rife with multiple forms of domination and ideological
control.
• Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality
and Lesbian Existence” (1980) confronts the
institution of heterosexuality head on, asserting that
heterosexuality is neither natural nor inevitable but is
instead a “compulsory,” contrived, constructed, and
taken-for-granted institution that serves the interests
of male dominance.
Setting the context
• Understanding heterosexuality as an
institution with processes and effects is
one of Rich’s greatest contributions.
• Monique Wittig’s “The Category of Sex”
(1992) takes the argument to a different
level, declaring heterosexuality a political
regime.
• Most important among these theorists was
their assertion that heterosexuality is
institutionalized and organized.
Challenges to institutionalized
heterosexuality
• Pressures from feminism, from the
lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgendered rights
movements.
• Efforts to pass laws allowing same sex couples
to marry.
• The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
• The prevalence of AIDS as a life-threatening
sexually transmitted disease.
• Research on the prevalence of marital infidelity.
• Disproportionate use of female workers in
developing countries.
• Loosening gender and sexuality norms in the
West.
Challenges to institutionalized
heterosexuality
• A significant divorce rate (4.3 out of 10
marriages end in divorce; for African
Americans, 6 out of 10);
• High rates of domestic and sexual violence (1
out of 4 women will be a victim of domestic
violence);
• The proliferation of single parenthood;
• The absence of jobs, women’s career
opportunities, day care, and job training all
have worked to destabilize institutionalized
heterosexuality.
• Of all these, women’s increasing economic
independence may be the single most
important reason for marriage’s increasing
irrelevance.
Challenges to institutionalized
heterosexuality
• Changes in popular perceptions of
sexuality on MTV, VH1, advertising,
popular music, gay or gay-friendly
television programming, mostly on
cable.
• Pivotal moments on prime time
television, e.g., Ellen.
• Significant representations of
sexuality variation in popular film,
e.g., Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Challenges to institutionalized
heterosexuality
• Rise of fundamentalist Christianity
• Growth of neo-conservative movement
• Pressure to enforce a conservative of
“traditional” view of heterosexuality by
Catholic Church and other groups
• Palimony
• Increases in reproductive freedoms, e.g.,
artificial insemination, adoption, birth control
• Declining interest in marriage and rise in single
parenthood
• Increases in domestic partnership and civil
union laws
Challenges to institutionalized
heterosexuality
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9/11
War in Iraq and Afghanistan
Influence of radical Islamic cultures
Bush economic policies and social
conservatism, e.g., abstinence only
sex education, funding of marriage
initiative
• Global warming
• Globalization
The heterosexual imaginary
• Our sexual orientation or sexual
identity—or even the notion that there is
such a thing—is defined by the
symbolic order of that world through
the use of verbal as well as non-verbal
language and images.
• The wedding ritual represents a major
site for the installation and maintenance
of the institution of heterosexuality.
• Weddings operate as naturallyoccurring—How did this happen?
Theoretical foundations
• A conceptual framework to examine how weddings
have become naturalized, and institutionalized.
• Theoretical foundations: Jacques Lacan—French
psychoanalytic theory of the imaginary
• The imaginary: the unmediated contact an infant
has to its own image and its connection with its
mother. Instead of facing a complicated, and
contradictory world, the infant experiences the
illusion of tranquility, and fullness. Infants
experience a sense of oneness with their primary
caretaker.
• Rearticulated by Louis Althusser—French
philosopher who incorporated Lacan’s theory of the
imaginary into a theory of ideology.
Theoretical foundations
• According to Althusser, ideology is
“the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of
existence.”
• The “imaginary” here does not mean
“pretend” but, rather, an imagined or
illusory relationship between an
individual and their social world.
The heterosexual imaginary
• Applied to a social theory of
heterosexuality, the heterosexual
imaginary is that way of thinking that
relies on romantic and sacred notions of
heterosexuality in order to create and
maintain the illusion of well-being and
oneness.
• This romantic view prevents us from
seeing how we have organized
institutionalized heterosexuality.
The heterosexual imaginary
• The heterosexual imaginary secures power,
the social production of material life, and
organizes gender while preserving racial,
class, and sexual hierarchies.
• The effect of this illusory depiction of
reality is that behaviors we associate with
heterosexuality are taken for granted,
thought of as naturally occurring, and
unquestioned while gender is understood
as something people are socialized into or
learn.
How the heterosexual imaginary works
• The heterosexual imaginary naturalizes male-tofemale social relations; male-to-female rituals;
and male-to-female organized practices.
• The heterosexual imaginary conceals the
operation of heterosexuality in structuring
gender across race, class, and sexuality.
• The heterosexual imaginary closes off any
critical analysis of heterosexuality as an
organizing institution.
• The heterosexual imaginary leaves
heterosexuality unexamined as an institution
• The heterosexual imaginary naturalizes
heterosexuality and obscures how it is learned.
The consequences of the heterosexual imaginary
• By treating the heterosexual imaginary as taken-forgranted and as natural, we lose our ability to make
conscious choices.
• Through the heterosexual imaginary, we perceive
the institution of heterosexuality as timeless,
independent of relations of ruling, devoid of
historical variation, and as “just the way it is.”
Social practices reinforce the illusion that as long
as one complies with this naturalized structure, all
will be right in the world. This illusion is commonly
known as romance.
• Romancing heterosexuality is creating an illusory
sexual identity category that defines perceived
female-to-male socio-sexual relations.
The consequences of the heterosexual imaginary
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Marital rape
Domestic and sexual violence
Pay inequities
Racism
Gay bashing
Femicide
Sexual harassment
Unpaid domestic work,
Inequalities of pay and opportunity,
Exploitation of women as sweatshop workers
in poor countries
• Privileging of married couples in the
dissemination of insurance benefits
The consequences of the heterosexual
imaginary
The heterosexual imaginary naturalizes
the regulation of gender and sexuality
through the
• institution of marriage;
• State domestic relations laws;
• Federal controls on who qualifies for
marriage and benefits.
It also sets the terms for:
• taxation,
• health care,
• housing benefits.
Codification of heterosexuality
Laws and public and private sector
policies use marriage as the primary
requirement for social and economic
benefits and access rather than
distributing resources on some other
basis such as citizenship.
Heteronormativity
• The view that institutionalized
heterosexuality constitutes the
standard for legitimate and expected
social and sexual relations.
• Heteronormativity represents one of
the main premises underlying the
heterosexual imaginary, ensuring that
the organization of heterosexuality in
everything from gender to weddings
to marital status is held up as both a
model and as “normal.”
Heteronormativity examples
• Surveys or intake questionnaires ask
respondents to check off their marital
status as either married, divorced,
separated, widowed, single, or, in
some cases, never married.
• Under what conditions is this
necessary and why?
Materialist feminist mode of inquiry
• An approach to social change and a
mode of inquiry.
• Provides a global analytic capable of
revealing the social, economic,
political, and ideological conditions
upon which taken-for-granted social
arrangements depend, e.g.,
heterosexuality and weddings.
Materialist feminist mode of inquiry
• This problematic understands materialism
as the economic context framing people’s
lives and work.
• This economic context includes the
division of labor and the distribution of
wealth (private property) in any particular
historical moment.
• This methodology also considers the
economic context in relation to national
and state interests as well as cultural
struggles over meaning and value.
Materialist feminist mode of inquiry
• The mode of inquiry considers the
nexus of social arrangements and
institutions that form the social
totalities of patriarchy and capitalism
• It considers how these arrangements
and institutions regulate our everyday
lives by distributing cultural power
and economic resources according to
gender, race, social class, and
sexuality.
Materialist feminist mode of inquiry
• Within this framework, rape and domestic
violence can be seen as the effect of social
structures that situate men hierarchically in
relation to women and to each other.
• Historically, this has been accomplished using
forms of social differentiation such as
institutionalized heterosexuality
• This form of heterosexuality is organized by an
historically specific heterogendered—that is,
the asymmetrical stratification of the sexes in
relation to the historically varying institutions
of patriarchal heterosexuality—and racial
components.
Materialist feminismcapitalism
Applying a materialist feminist analytic to
capitalism means examining it as a regime for:
•
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the production of surplus value (profit);
the securing of private property (accumulation);
the exploitation and alienation of life and labor;
the division and distribution of labor and wealth;
global and state interests;
those meaning-making systems that reproduce
capitalism and patriarchy.
A materialist feminist approach also understands
that capitalism operates under varying historical,
regional, and global conditions of existence.
Materialist feminismpatriarchy
• Patriarchy is also historically variable,
producing a hierarchy of heterogender
divisions that privilege men as a group and
exploit women as a group.
• Patriarchy structures social practices that it
represents as natural and universal and that
are reinforced by its organizing institutions
and rituals (e.g., marriage and weddings).
• Its continued success depends on the
maintenance of regimes of difference as well
as on a range of material forces.
• It is a totality that not only varies crossnationally, but also manifests differently
across ethnic, racial, and class boundaries
within nations.
Materialist feminism methodology
• Determine what is concealed or
excluded in relation to what is
presumed or presented.
• This method makes visible the
“permitted” meanings—what the
culture allows us to say—in
constructions of weddings, marriage,
and ultimately, heterosexuality.
Materialist feminism ideology
• Ideologies—or belief systems—are
essentially statements or images that
legitimize a society’s dominant
behaviors.
• The beliefs are disseminated through
the dominant institutions of a culture
and work to naturalize a host of
social arrangements, e.g., femininity
or racial difference. While gender or
racial difference seems obvious, it is
a society’s dominant ideologies that
shape our view of the world.
Materialist feminismideology critique
• Materialist feminist ideology critique seeks to
demystify the ways in which dominant beliefs
are authorized and inscribed in subjectivities
(what it means to be a wife, a bride, or a
mother), institutional arrangements (marriage),
and various cultural narratives (films,
magazines, television, ads).
• Like those taken-for-granted beliefs, encoded
as power relations within social texts and
practices, ideology is central to the
reproduction of the social order.
• Because it produces what is allowed to count
as reality, ideology constitutes a material force
and at the same time is shaped by other
economic and political forces.
Materialist feminismideology critique
• The work of dominant ideologies, such as
romantic love, is to conceal contradictions in
order to maintain the social order.
• Yet breaks in the seamless logic of capitalism
and patriarchy allow oppositional social
practices, counter-ideologies, and social
movements to emerge.
• Critique is a “decoding” practice that exposes
textual boundaries and the ideologies that
manage them, revealing the taken-for-granted
order they perpetuate and opening up
possibilities for change.
Materialist feminismideology critique
• Situates ideologies historically and
materially and offers both a critical
understanding of the object of inquiry as
well as insights into how to effect
emancipatory social change.
• Ideology critique reveals the terms upon
which we have secured dominance—
institutionalized heterosexuality and the
interests it serves.