White Weddings Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, 2 nd edition by Chrys Ingraham

Chapter Five: And They Lived Happily Ever After…

The Fairy Tale Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a handsome prince met a beautiful maiden, swept her off her feet, married her in a perfect white wedding ceremony, and carried her away to a land of fairy tales and dreams where they raised three gorgeous children and lived happily ever after. This is the dominant romantic fairy-tale story line.

The Fairy Tale Interrupted Examining the social and material conditions upon which white weddings depend does not allow for a happy ending. The consequences of many of the practices associated with white weddings, the wedding- industrial complex, and the wedding- ideological complex are disturbing and unsettling. In a society filled with various types of fairy tales and romance, e.g., love, sports, and religion, it is sometimes difficult to see our real conditions of existence, let alone attend to the hardships and inequities they produce, the ways we are implicated in these problems, and the powerful interests they serve.

The Fairy Tale Interrupted Examining all of these sites together reveals the extent to which the dominant social order seeks to produce feminine subjects whose very existence and identity is organized by the ideology of romantic love In addition to gaining consent to the heterogendered division of labor where women are responsible for and provide unpaid domestic and affective labor, the less obvious outcome is the privileging of romance discourse in women’s everyday lives.

The Fairy Tale Interrupted Given the role of the heterosexual imaginary in concealing the operation of heterosexuality in structuring gender, race, class, and the division of labor, the promise of romance combined with “the most important day in your life” becomes a powerful means to secure women’s consent to capitalist patriarchal social arrangements. It represents the promise of a reward— the white wedding—for compliance with the terms of the dominant social order. It is a mechanism that secures whiteness as dominant and patriarchal heterosexuality as superior.

The white wedding as packaged and sold by the wedding-industrial complex is both homogeneous—McBride—and the site for the simulation of social relations that we hope will take care of our utopian desires for love, community, belonging, and meaningful labor. While wedding culture perpetuates notions of heterosexual supremacy, particularly in relation to its use of gay characters, it also secures white supremacy through its use and exclusion of historically underrepresented people. More than that, the implied expectation that people of color assimilate to the cultural practices of white America works to both elevate whiteness and perpetuate racial hierarchies. The Fairy Tale Interrupted

If we give up the illusions romance and the wedding-industrial complex create or foster, we give up the state of affairs for which we needed illusions. What would take their place? What if we redirected our desires and labor to our real conditions of existence? What does this “fairy tale” reveal about our social priorities? What would it mean if we changed our social priorities to those that would be people- based not marriage-based? The Fairy Tale Interrupted

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