Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan's Bridal Industry
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...
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"Do not be misled by the title of this book. It is a study of Taiwan's bridal industry but it is also a fine ethnography of marriage in contemporary urban Taipei. With great subtlety, Bonnie Adrian shows us how much marriage in Taiwan has changed and how many of the old ways it has retained. She does so with wit and humor."—Margery Wolf, author of A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility"Faced with the puzzle of the ubiquitous bridal photography in Taipei, Bonnie Adrian has produced a model ethnography of media-saturated contemporary life. Ethnographically adventurous, analytically smart, and warmly human, this book cleverly unpacks the ways women's canny choices in Taiwan are forged at the intersection of everyday worlds of inter-generational tension, fantasies fed by a keenly competitive local culture industry, and global imagery tied to the transnational beauty industry. Unlike many who work on globalization, Adrian has not lost sight of the ways that gender and family are still at the heart of people's social worlds and women are not victims."—Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Veiled Sentiments and Writing Women's Worlds
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Framings11How Can This Be? Ethnographic Contexts and History242Fantasy for Sale: The Modern Bridal Industry513Inner and Outer Worlds in Changing Taipei764Family Wedding Rites and Banquets1085Making Up the Bride1476Romance in the Photo Studio1807Contextualizing Bridal Photos in Taiwan's Visual Culture2048The Context of Looking: What Taipei Viewers See224Conclusion: Reframings239Notes247Bibliography273Index287
