Product Description

From sitcoms and soap operas to talk shows and movies, Americans are in love with the idea of a white wedding. The happy bride and groom smile from the covers of fashion and entertainment magazines, and appear in TV commercials to sell everything from life insurance to antacid. Fascinated by this national obsession, Chrys Ingraham peers behind the veil to question the meaning of weddings in American popular culture.

What she finds is nothing less than a wedding industrial complex. The wedding industry does a thriving business with annual revenues in excess of 30 billion dollars. The average cost of a wedding is over $19,000, with 2.4 million couples getting married each year. White Weddings is the first book to investigate the underside of this recession-proof industry, exposing how weddings are used to sell a heterosexual fairy tale.

Ingraham draws on popular media, such as bridal magazines, children's toys, feature films, television, and advertising to reveal how they regulate gender, sexuality, race, and class. Weddings mean more than just flowers and flatware, but are part of a belief system that relies on romantic and sacred notions of heterosexuality to maintain the illusion of normalcy. This entertaining and insightful book will make you think twice about ever wanting to catch the bouquet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #626581 in Books
• Published on: 1999-07-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used the term "the imaginary" to describe the unmediated relationship an infant has to its own image and to its mother. Ingraham, an associate professor of sociology at Russell Sage College for Women, borrows heavily from Lacan's concept to describe the way in which we're conditioned to think about heterosexuality and its place in traditional weddings. She describes the "heterosexual imaginary" as "a belief system that relies on romantic and sacred notions of heterosexuality in order to create and maintain the illusion of well being." According to Ingraham, this illusion is reinforced by the fetishization of weddings. In her scathing view, "the big day" reinforces a racist, classist and heterosexual social order. Ingraham skewers all aspects of the modern wedding, from the labor practices involved in the manufacture and marketing of gowns to the white-only marketing strategies of major bridal magazines. With intelligence and perception, she describes the makeup of the "wedding-industrial complex," which relentlessly markets nuptials (especially white weddings) and relies on the pervasive media images of marriage ceremonies to keep itself "recession-proof." Although her tone is academic, Ingraham's writing is lively and persuasive. One of the few studies of weddings, this important addition to cultural studies could make a few potential brides and grooms rethink that long walk to the altar.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Los Angeles Times
"...an interesting look at the institution of marriage."

Review
Anyone who finds the idyllic ending 'And they lived happily ever after' worthy of a good eye-rolling and a dose of cynicism will savor reading Chrys Ingraham's new book, White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. Written from a sociological perspective, Ingraham 'lifts the veil' on the wedding industry and systematically rips apart the classist, racist, and heterosexist seams holding this outfit together. -- Cultural Studies
The strength of Ingraham's works lies with her talent as a limber critic, as she always matches method to question and the personal to the political. White Weddings offers more than isolated critiques of race, class, gender, and media politics. Instead, the author fluidly integrates her arguments, showing the process by which these contexts mutually affect and confound one another through both the discursive and material practices of society's most recognized ritual. -- Cultural Studies
An interesting look at the institution of marriage...This book probably won't be on the must-read lists of most brides and grooms to be, but it is an interesting look at the institution of marriage. Or, rather the industry of marriage as the author emphasizes in her clear-eyed view of weddings...Ingraham, an associate professor of sociology at Russell Sage College, tears away the veil of fantasy and takes a hard look at bridal magazines, religion, the garment industry, the media, and just plain capitalism, and how they all figure into this tradition. -- Los Angeles Times
A brilliant (and fun!) look at the institution/industry of marriage in the late-twentieth-century United States. -- Sojourner: The Women's Forum
Chrys Ingraham is alarmed. We've been brainwashed, she argues in her new book White Weddings. The sociology professor writes about how weddings have more to do these days with marketing and economics than with spirituality and reality. -- Chicago Sun Times
By looking closely at one of our society's most popular, yet unexamined, cultural rituals, Ingraham advances an understanding of the impact of the social construction of heterosexuality as a dominant institution. Anyone seeking to understand gender and sexuality as they interface with race and class in the US and what happens to those who step out of line must read this informative study. -- Charlotte Bunch, Executive Director, Center for Women's Global Leadership, Rutgers University
In this original and provocative book, Ingraham pierces the glossy surface of the wedding to reveal a logic of heterosexual domination. This is a pioneering text in the new field of critical heterosexual studies. -- Steven Seidman, author of Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary America
Ingraham's topic is a fascinating one...Recommended for use in...Marriage and Family and Gender classes, as well as for your own reading pleasure. It is well-written, interesting and insightful. I learned a lot from it and I am exceedingly pleased that my students did as well. -- Contemporary Sociology
Delicious. Chrys Ingraham is Martha Stewart's nightmare--finally! Her mission is to debunk, dethrone, and of course, defrock that blushing bride and handsome groom. For anyone who's ever wondered what the fuss is all about, White Weddings is a must read. -- Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook

Customer Reviews

Highly Recommended!
Chrys Ingraham, in her book, White Weddings, shows a behind-the-scenes look on the wedding industry. She effectively presents to the reader the ugly truths about the diamond industry, racism in wedding catalogs, homosexuality, and what happens after marriage. This excellent book opened up my eyes to what goes on behind such a supposedly "beautiful" occurrence in females' lives. This book not only opened up my eyes to the wedding industry, but to other matters as well, such as child labor, animal abuse, and sex trafficking. White Weddings was an inspiration to me to go out and see what I can do to help change the world in order to make it a better place. Fortunately, there are people like Chrys Ingraham, who want to make the world a peaceful and just place for everyone to live in. I also highly recommend her other books as well!

From: a very inspired student

Ranting instead of argument
I began this book expecting to agree with much of it but was very disappointed. The author is ranting instead of calmly stating a realistic argument. If I understood correctly, she believes that the Wedding Industrial Complex (with some vague notions of society and government) CAUSES women to desire marriage, view themselves as princesses and then spend as much money as possible on the wedding.
Although her argument is far-reaching her facts are extremely narrow- (she spends a chunk of the book repeating herself with magazine advertising statistics).
If her point was to let us know that many business owners within the wedding industry do not operate out of good will but are in fact out to make as much money as possible, point taken. But I knew that before I read the book.

A vitally important work...
In writing this book Chrys takes great risk in exposing "Weddings", especially "White Weddings" as an unneccessary rite of passage -- She brings to light in vivid raw detail why our society 'views' them as normal.

This is not a 'nice' book, a 'feel good' book, one that at the end you say 'oh how wonderful' -- instead it is an important piece that everyone needs to read.

"Writing this book has been a wrenching experience." In having the privilege of being one of Chrys's students, I've had the opportunity to see first hand -- what a process writing 'white weddings' was. There is heart in this book, sometimes one of steal, but nevertheless one with enduring spirit. In Ingraham's epilogue she writes, "What allows us to imagine possibilities? To continue to live shrouded in romance is to participate in and benefit from such atrocities. Confronting the reasons for which we need romance is to see what it conceals. Critiquing the heterosexual imaginary is one step in that direction."

I've never looked at the wedding industry the same since reading this monumentally significant text. Never before has Ingraham's work been as important as now.