Fashioning Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Transnational Gazes and the Production of Romance in Asian/American Bridal Photography

This article explores bridal makeovers, the visual production of bodily transformations in these practices, and the documentation of those transformations through bridal photography. It argues that photography performs three main intertwining functions. First, wedding photographs naturalize gender, emphasizing youth and beauty of the bridal body. Second, fashion photography taken of Asian American couples prior to the wedding functions simultaneously to demystify race by incorporating the subjects into narratives of heterosexual romance. Third, in creating these images, Asians and Asian Americans fashion themselves as cosmopolitan, global bodies able to traverse class, race, and nation through their participation in consumer capitalism.