The Wedding Complex by Elizabeth Freeman

The Wedding Complex by Elizabeth Freeman

Explores the significance of the wedding ceremony by asking what the wedding becomes when you separate it from the idea of marriage. This book finds that weddings - as performances, fantasies, and rituals of transformation - are sites for imagining and enacting forms of social intimacy other than monogamous heterosexuality.

“The Wedding Complex by Elizabeth Freeman is an extremely original and important workFreeman takes a distinctly new and different approach to American canonical texts, asking what forms of belonging and desire they produce outside of normative marital unions. For Freeman, the wedding produces and imagines social and cultural relations and kinship forms even as the heterosexual marriage erases these other modes of desire.”—Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity
“Elizabeth Freeman’s The Wedding Complex performs a crucial scholarly and public service—disentangling the messy, expansive, uncontainable work of the wedding from the normative regulation of the law of marriage. This book is sharp, funny, and deeply significant to current understandings of what is at stake in what are reductively called ‘the marriage debates.’ A must-read for activists and policymakers as well as across the disciplines.”—Lisa Duggan, author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American
Modernity
“This subtly argued book provides welcome relief from the predictable debates that often surround the issue of same-sex marriage. Uncoupling the ritual of the wedding from the legal reality of the marriage, Elizabeth Freeman demonstrates that weddings are, in and of themselves, quite queer indeed. . . . She provides a cogent argument for avoiding the marriage trap while encouraging us to throw all the parties we want.” * Out *

Elizabeth Freeman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780822329893
ISBN 10	0822329891
Title	The Wedding Complex
Author	Elizabeth Freeman
Series	Series Q
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Duke University Press
Year published	2002-10-31
Number of pages	312
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.