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. 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.

This collection of original essays will unravel the current heterosexual scene in two parts: one on rights and privileges, the other on popular culture. Topics covered include weddings, proms, citizenship, marriage penalties, cartoons, mermaids and myth.

What is heterosexuality? In recent years, scholars in all fields have spent so much time defining homosexuality, that the nature of heterosexuality goes unexplored. In White Wedding, Chrys Ingraham began to ask the important questions about the nature of the institution--how was heterosexuality invented, naturalized, normalized, and institutionalized? These questions begin to define the field that Ingraham has dubbed 'Critical Heterosexual Studies'. In Thinking Straight, a collection of original essays will unravel the current heterosexual scene. The collection will be broken into three parts: one on power, one on paradox, and one on promise. Topics will include: cartoons and heterosexuality; weddings; proms; citizenship; marriage penalties; mermaids and myth.

During the 1980s, capitalism triumphantly secured its global reach, anti-communist ideologies hammered home socialism's inherent failure, the New Left increasingly moved into the professional middle class--and many of feminism's earlier priorities were marginalized. "Identity politics," often formulated in terms of social reconstructionism or multiculturalism, has increasingly suppressed materialist feminism's systematic perspective, replacing it with discourse analysis or cultural politics. Materialist Feminism: A Reader argues against the retreat to multiculturalism for keeping invisible the material links among the explosion of meaning-making practices in highly industrialized social sectors, the exploitation of women's labor, and the appropriation of women's bodies that continues to undergird the scramble for profits and state power in multinational capitalism.

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. 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.