Framing the Bride

Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan's Bridal Industry

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by Bonnie Adrian

University of California Press

Due/Published December 2003, 306 pages, paper

ISBN 0520238346

With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to photographers, make-up artists, and hair stylists who, using the tricks of commercial photography, create an image of her that--with fairer skin, eyes like a "Western doll," and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV--transforms her beyond recognition.

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 wedding 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 exuding romance, Taiwanese brides engage in a new rite of passage--one that challenges the terms of marriage set out in conventional wedding rites. 

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