Response

We are pleased that Cinderella Dreams continues to serve as a provocative vehicle for discussing how to think about and through the scholarly study of gender, consumption, and ritual. We are also grateful that our reviewers concur that the book is wide-ranging and engaging. Likewise, we are happy that the reviewers understood that our goal in writing the book was to offer a broad-brush treatment of how and why the lavish wedding has become so compelling in contemporary consumer culture. In this reply, we identify and address some of our reviewers' assumptions about female consumption and the wedding's relation to marriage, and then consider specific critiques of our research methods.

First, several of the reviewers are seeking a condemnation of the lavish wedding as both capitalist exploitation of low-wage workers around the world and of nature, and anti-feminist entrapment of women in the still unequal institution of heterosexual marriage. In truth, as we were writing this book, several books appeared whose main purpose was to offer a materialist feminist or feminist queer studies perspective on the hegemonic nature of the lavish wedding and its various sub-rituals. These books warn women against the dangers of women "falling for" the lavish wedding and of making heterosexual marriage a privileged status preferable to other ways of living. Some allude to the processes of exploitation underlying the production of the goods and services of the lavish wedding and honeymoon.¹ Friedrich Engels only briefly mentioned the term "false consciousness" in explaining why workers did not recognize their true interests as proletarians. Subsequent Marxist social critics extended the idea of false consciousness to any embrace of consumer culture. Those who took pleasure in consumerism were seen as displaying false consciousness and since this pleasure was gendered female, it was mostly women who were thought to be easily led astray. Feminists such as Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique were for the most part using Marxist analysis in seeing female consumption as manipulation or conspiracy of experts and advertisers that produced traditional gender roles.² Wedding consumption is especially gendered female because of its association with women realizing romantic dreams and fantasies.

Third-wave feminists have been decidedly more sympathetic toward fashion, beauty, and romance. Historians, no doubt inspired by the third wave, have seen love of fashion as compatible with protest and the appeal (yes, magic) of makeup, beauty, and stylish clothing.³ The third wave also coincides with the rise of a postmodernist thinking that no longer divides consciousness into two clear and distinguishable kinds: false and true. Indeed, there is an open question whether one can speak of consciousness as a unitary state as opposed to multiple or simply changing in relation to circumstances. Finding ourselves in agreement with much of the third wave, we began our book with the assumption that manipulation and false consciousness would not serve as sufficient explanations for why this occasion remains so compelling for the millions of women and men who embrace the wedding—and why it is now compelling among many of those who felt excluded by the ritual, including many feminist couples, straight and gay. In our view the lavish wedding must be examined as a floating signifier (tradition in one place, modern in another), potentially memorable and meaningful—and desired as magical.

Besides the false consciousness argument, the other major explanation of some feminists is that the allure of the lavish wedding is functionalist, that the lavish wedding glamorizes the institution of marriage or compensates women for a married life of hardship and self-sacrifice. Bonnie Adrian found that brides in Taiwan offered this attribution, even as she pointed out that their lives would probably be made easier by the availability of women service workers from the Philippines.⁴ We agree that the lavish wedding makes "getting married" more appealing as a consumer and romantic experience and spectacle and even increases the appeal of "getting married" again in a vow renewal ceremony. Moreover, the "once-in-a-lifetime" explanation does serve as a rationalization for spending lavishly.

However, fantasies and dreams may lead to lavish...