Wedding Complex

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

• Preface Acknowledgments 1. Love among the Ruins 2. The We of Me: The Member of the Wedding’s Novel Alliances 3. “That Troth Which Failed to Plight”: Race, the Wedding, and Kin Aesthetics in Absalom, Absalom! 4. “A Diabolical Circle for the Divell to Daunce In”: Foundational Weddings and the Problem of Civil Marriage 5. Honeymoon with a Stranger: Private Couplehood and the Making of the National Subject 6. The Immediate Country, or, Heterosexuality in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Coda Notes Selected Bibliography Index

“The Wedding Complex by Elizabeth Freeman is an extremely original and important work. Freeman 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)