Framing the Bride - Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan′s Bridal Industry

1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-0-520-23834-3
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 310 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 520 g

With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to bridal photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists to transform her image beyond recognition. They give her fairer skin, eyes like a Western baby doll, and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV.

An absorbing consideration of contemporary bridal practices in Taiwan, Framing the Bride shows how the lavish photographs represent more than mere conspicuous consumption. They are artifacts infused with cultural meaning and emotional significance, products of the gender- and generation-based conflicts in Taiwan’s hybrid system of modern matrimony. From the bridal photographs, the book opens out into broader issues such as courtship, marriage, kinship, globalization, and the meaning of the "West" and "Western" cultural images of beauty.

Bonnie Adrian argues that in compiling enormous bridal albums full of photographs of brides and grooms in varieties of finery, posed in different places, and exuding romance, Taiwanese brides engage in a new rite of passage—one that challenges the terms of marriage set out in conventional wedding rites. In Framing the Bride, we see how this practice is also a creative response to U.S. domination of transnational visual imagery—how bridal photographers and their subjects take the project of globalization into their own hands, defining its terms for their lives even as they expose the emptiness of its images.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Adrian, Bonnie

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kultursoziologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Familiensoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Sozialethnologie: Familie, Gender, Soziale Gruppen
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie des Brauchtums und der Traditionen
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Framings
1. How Can This Be? Ethnographic Contexts and History
2. Fantasy for Sale: The Modern Bridal Industry
3. Inner and Outer Worlds in Changing Taipei
4. Family Wedding Rites and Banquets
5. Making Up the Bride
6. Romance in the Photo Studio
7. Contextualizing Bridal Photos in Taiwan’s Visual Culture
8. The Context of Looking: What Taipei Viewers See
Conclusion: Reframings

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Bonnie Adrian is Social Sciences Core Lecturer at the University of Denver.