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Weddings, Intimacies and Families
Weddings, Intimacies and Families
Abstract Submissions Closed
Friday, 26 February 2021: 16:00-17:30
Location:
RC06 Family Research (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
This session seeks to explore the meaning of weddings across the globe in the context of family studies. Weddings are often associated with cultural traditions, passed down through generations, or (re)invented to legitimise certain practices. Given supposed changes to intimacy and personal life in late modernity, weddings may offer an opportunity for couples to play with these traditions, re-imagine ceremonies or reject them altogether. In other contexts, however, the salience of tradition may represent the limits of individual agency. In British weddings, for example, it is still common for fathers to ‘give away’ their daughters, for men to provide after-dinner speeches and women to change their surnames to that of their husband’s during the ceremony. With weddings marking the start of formalised coupling, it is striking that these strictly gendered roles and behaviours remain so strongly embedded with the ceremony. The session will be concerned with how weddings operate globally as: markers of intimacy between couples; ceremonies bringing together and forging new familial relationships; sites of the invention and reinvention of tradition; resources for a global wedding industry, consumer marketplace and media obsession; repressive rituals maintaining gendered inequalities in (heterosexual) relationships and wider kinship networks; or conversely places for radical and political activism where weddings can operate to destabilise the norm. Papers may include but are not limited to:
· Weddings and inequalities
· Traditions, rituals, kinship
· Radical weddings
· Consumption, media and wedding ceremonies
· Weddings, romance and sexuality
· Race and weddings
· Non-weddings and wedding alternatives
Session Organizer: