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| Feminist Weddings |
Quotes ...
"Any feminist getting married has to admit that there is a bow to tradition taking place here, that there are serious issues to be reconciled between being feminist and choosing to be a part of marriage as an institution." - Lisa Miya-Jervis, Editor of Bitch magazine.
"I don't scorn anyone for marrying. People who choose to marry should just know their decision is more than private-- that in doing so they continue the priority for marriage over other ways of living." - Priscilla Yamin, writer.
"Though I've worked many years to make marriage more equal, I never expected to take advantage of it myself, I'm happy, surprised and one day will write about it, but for now, I hope this proves what feminists have always said - that feminism is about the ability to choose what's right at each time of our lives. - Gloria Steinem
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Articles ...
Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures In Love And Partnership : The term "wife" is fraught with conflicting connotations for many young women today. Although the word suggests companionship and commitment, it's weighted with the knowledge that marriage is a male-dominated institution in which women have been subservient for centuries. In this provocative collection of essays, writers in their twenties and thirties discuss how they're navigating the waters of sanctified long-term relationships. Juhu Thukral speaks of marrying to please her traditional Indian parents; Rachel Fudge wonders whether alternative ceremonies can lead to greater equality in marriage; and Leslie Miller struggles with being identified as half of a couple. Straight and queer authors give intimate looks at their love lives, particularly their present (or just-past) long-term relationships. Topics range from how one woman ended up in a nine-year trilateral relationship that resulted in children to how an author is balancing her needs for privacy and intimacy. Topics in between include how to deal with lesbian weddings, straight weddings, balancing partners' ethnicity, having children, naming children, not having children, not getting married at all, and being a lesbian married to a gay man. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415918405/qid=1058752372/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6468307-6704959?v=glance&s=books
"Though I've worked many years to make marriage more equal, I never expected to take advantage of it myself, I'm happy, surprised and one day will write about it, but for now, I hope this proves what feminists have always said - that feminism is about the ability to choose what's right at each time of our lives. - Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms Magazine. Several years ago, Gloria Steinem, a first-time bride at age 66, married entrepreneur David Bale, 61. During the ceremony, the word "partners" was substituted for "husband and wife."http://www.indiebride.com/interviews/jervis/index.html
White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality In Popular Culture : French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used the term "the imaginary" to describe the unmediated relationship an infant has to its own image and to its mother. Ingraham, an associate professor of sociology at Russell Sage College for Women, borrows heavily from Lacan's concept to describe the way in which we're conditioned to think about heterosexuality and its place in traditional weddings. She describes the "heterosexual imaginary" as "a belief system that relies on romantic and sacred notions of heterosexuality in order to create and maintain the illusion of well being." According to Ingraham, this illusion is reinforced by the fetishization of weddings. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1555834841/ref%3Dsim%5Fbooks/102-6468 307-6704959
The Essential Guide to Lesbian and Gay Weddings This wittily written, well-organized, and creatively laid-out guide offers historical background and practical suggestions covering all aspects of the event, from what to call it to wording the invitations, buying rings, and booking the honeymoon suite. Acknowledging the inherently political statement of the act as well as personal degrees of coming out, the authors provide sensitive counsel by encouraging the couple to present a positive (not defensive) attitude to the heterocentric world, keeping their own priorities foremost and making sure the entire process remains fun. http://www.jsonline.com/lifestyle/people/jul01/nowed15071101a.asp
Here Comes The Bride: Women, Weddings, And The Marriage Mystique : Jaclyn Geller's (who prefers the term "spinster by choice" over "single") *Here comes the Bride* offers an important and very readable challenge to the mythology of marrriage. While critiquing the common rituals of the wedding in the United States she shows the everyday ways that marriage is still contantly being re-created as a false mythology for women. While many women will respond with the cry "marriage is a free choice!" Geller makes clear how our choices carry with them historical and cultural baggage that connect them to oppressive ideas about women's roles. "Perhaps the reluctance to relinquish one's social independence and physical space is not a disturbance but a healthy response to the claustrophobic ideal of intimacy championed by the human potential movement." http://www.indiebride.com/interviews/freeman/index.html
The Wedding Complex: Forms Of Beloning In Modern American Culture " : And the traditional white wedding actually contains all kinds of gestures toward historical moments when marriage was not controlled by the state, but by fathers or by the church, and in the present moment, by shopping." Elizabeth Freeman shows how weddings are important not because they lead to marriage but because they are public performances of pageantry and celebration. Beginning with debates about same-sex marriage and queer politics, she goes on to analyze the work of such authors as Carson McCullers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and Vladimir Nabokov as well as films such as Father of the Bride, The Deer Hunter and the Godfather. http://www.indiebride.com/interviews/cott/index.html
Public Vows : Marriage is thought of as the ultimate expression of devotion and intimacy. But is it truly a personal matter between two people in love? No, says Historian Nancy Cott - at least not entirely. "In terms of the racial aspect of the story, it is interesting how consistently I found that the national government held coercive policies on marriage towards groups designated as nonwhite.' http://www.womenspress.com/newspaper/1998/wedding.htm
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Celebrating Feminist Weddings ...
Traditionally, weddings have been an occasion for women to promise obedience, relinquish their names, and be captured, bought and bartered for. Although most of these practices are absent from today's ceremonies, their presence in our collective memory reveals their deep roots in the culture. With such roots, it is amazing the ceremony survives at all among feminists. But like marriage itself, the wedding is an evolving institution as amenable to feminism as it is to any other belief. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/fashion/20THIR.html
Today, when marriage is routinely delayed past 30 and the 20's are often an extended adolescence - a time of romantic and professional hopscotch - a 30th birthday feels to many the way 21 once did, as the gateway to the more serious adult world. It is no longer a day to count up regrets stoically, but to pop the Moët & Chandon. Increasingly, it is celebrated with all the pomp of a graduation blowout or a wedding reception, with formal invitations, speeches, rented halls or yachts, and guest lists drawn from every stage of the person's life. http://www.indiebride.com/
"My hope is that Indiebride will fill a much-needed niche in the bridal media, that it will be a place for would-be brides who have more on their minds than planning a reception, women who never for a second believed in Prince Charming and who have not, despite all of the cultural cues, been breathlessly awaiting their wedding day for their whole life." http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0878339779/ref=ase_indiebride-20/102-6468307-6704959?v=glance&s=books
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ARTICLE RESEARCHED AND COLLATED FOR THE AUGUST 2003 NEWSLETTER
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