[ecrea] CfP: ‘Something old, something new: the wedding spectacle across contemporary media cultures’

*‘Something old, something new: the wedding spectacle across 
contemporary media cultures’, Friday September 16^th , 2016*

*The Media and Gender research group at the University of Leicester is 
pleased to invite abstracts for this one-day symposium*

*Keynote speakers: Brenda Weber (Indiana University Bloomington) and 
Deborah Jermyn (University of Roehampton)*

*Discussant: Diane Negra (University College Dublin)*

Despite the ravages of the financial crisis, the ensuing era of 
austerity, and a continuing historic decline in marriage rates, what 
Chrys Ingraham (2008) calls the ‘wedding-industrial complex’ appears to 
have emphatically bucked the trend, and continues to grow at an 
exponential rate. At the same time, whilst the wedding spectacle is 
increasingly prevalent across television and film, the cultural terrain 
upon which weddings are performed is also shifting through the 
proliferation of new media technologies, changing photography practices, 
‘selfie’ culture, and the intensifying cultural imperatives towards 
self-stylisation.

This symposium seeks to explore how this increasing visibility of the 
wedding spectacle across media culture can be understood in relation to 
broader shifts and transformations in the politics of gender, sexuality, 
class and race. Some of the questions that we seek to address are: How 
have the international but deeply uneven shifts in legislation around 
equal marriage resignified the gender politics of the wedding? How are 
the changing ways in which ceremonies are photographed and shared 
through social media networks remaking our understanding of the wedding 
as a public/private event?  How are national, cultural and ethnic 
identities negotiated, intensified or reworked through the wedding 
spectacle? Does the increased visibility of the wedding-as-spectacle 
signal a renewed attachment to traditional heteronormativity and 
patriarchal practices? Or can the wedding spectacle open up new 
expressive possibilities for contesting and resisting gender norms?

This symposium invites papers which address these questions through 
considerations of the wedding spectacle across all forms of media, or 
which relate to any of the following themes:

·questions of patriarchy, postfeminism and ‘re-traditionalization’

·spectacles of ‘equal’ marriage: weddings, queerness and heteronormativity

·the class politics of the wedding spectacle

·weddings as spectacles of multiculturalism

·weddings, women’s labour and cultural value

·the political economy of wedding media

*Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words. Please send them to 
(mediaweddings /at/ leicester.ac.uk) <mailto:(mediaweddings /at/ leicester.ac.uk)> by 
July 15^th , 2016. *

The Media and Gender group 
<http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/media/research/the-media-and-gender-research-group> 
is an exciting, interdisciplinary, and growing research group based in 
the Department of Media and Communication at the University of 
Leicester. The symposium is also supported by the new University of 
Leicester research institute, Cultural and Media Economies (CAMEo). 
Members of the organising committee for the symposium are: Helen Wood, 
Jilly Boyce Kay, Melanie Kennedy, Claire Jenkins, Dafni Mangalousi, 
Patricia Routh, and Natasha Whiteman.

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