White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture (review)

What is needed for a white wedding? Dress, cake, groom, bride. Chrys Ingraham's White Weddings uses the typical 'white wedding' so popular in the United States to investigate normative heterosexuality, globalized economic structures, and the impact of popular culture on ritualized aspects of life. This second edition has benefited from the addition of new material, with Ingraham closely examining the role globalization has played in the manufacture of material items related to the standard white wedding, such as the elaborate dress the bride may wear. Ingraham highlights the ironic disjuncture between the romanticized image of the white dress, with the grueling and exploitative conditions of its creation by women, for women. This is not a book about white weddings as it is about the ways modern weddings represent an enactment of hetereosexual privilege, and how the wedding is the result of an industry of various elements, from periodicals to jewelers to clothing manufacturers.

Much of the information Ingraham presents is interesting and sometimes thought-provoking, but there is inconsistent analysis. The author often restates a complicated theoretical argument succinctly, follows with a list of examples, sometimes explicitly related to the stated interpretation. Perhaps such lists of 'facts' persuade otherwise reluctant undergraduates that the theoretical statement may in fact be applicable, but for a reader more interested in an in-depth investigation of the workings of cultural life, the examples prove frustrating. In addition, at times, illustrative examples are either not clearly linked or misplaced in the text. A list of rote phrases used in all film and television weddings studied by the author (such as "I've waited my whole life for this day") illustrates, for Ingraham, "the intense socialization effort that the wedding-ideological complex has undertaken in constructing femininity." (175) What is disconcerting is that the list of incantations ("It's my wedding day!") is not related by the author to her earlier discussion of the ritualistic aspects of media messages about weddings.

White Weddings is positioned as an undergraduate textbook; the publisher has a website with powerpoint lecture slides for one chapter, for example. Unfortunately, the text does not provide the apparatus that would make the book eminently usable in the classroom. Key concepts are inconsistently italicized, the index is insufficient and not related to key concepts (for example, there is no entry for "Ritual"). Complex theoretical ideas are clearly and admirably defined. As an introductory text to studying contemporary popular culture, White Weddings offers an attractive topical focus with some weaknesses of approach and presentation.