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.

eBook - PDF
Framing the Bride
Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry
- 313 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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Information
Publisher
University of California PressYear
2003Print ISBN
9780520238343
Edition
1eBook ISBN
9780520930032
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- 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
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Yes, you can access Framing the Bride by Bonnie Adrian in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.