Promising Images of Love: Religion, Norms, and the Mediatisation of Weddings

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to contribute to this Special Issue titled “Promising Images of Love: Religion, Norms, and the Mediatisation of Weddings”, which focuses on weddings and their diverse representions, performances, and meanings in historical and contemporary perspectives. Weddings are understood as rites de passage (van Gennep, 2019) that are performed in religious traditions and many cultures of the past and in the present. The religious significance of rites of passage is manifested by symbolically transforming the social status of the individuals (the wedding couple), enabling them to transcend the everyday world. Thereby, a general order of existence (family, gender, status) is expressed and reconfigured (Geertz, 1993, 90). The actual wedding rituals are as diverse as each cultural–religious context; they adapt to them, and change over the course of time. At the same time, some traditional elements are also passed on.

The focus of this Special Issue “Promising Images of Love” is the ways in which weddings mediate values that are often highly normative in reference to specific religious traditions. Norms in this context are understood as guidelines to act by, which express specific values and justify normative acts. Values and norms in wedding practices are numerous, complex, and interlinked on several levels, notably social, political, cultural, historical, and economic.

This Special Issue invites authors to scrutinize how wedding practices enclose and reshape different religious norms and values as well as stereotypes with the intent to highlight the performativity of their mediatisation. Mediatisation in the current approach is understood as the interaction between culture, including religion and the media, in a broad sense that comprises all kinds of artefacts of material and visual culture such as images, films, fashion, and architecture. Mediatisation describes the interaction of these two areas and how they adapt to and transform one other.

The following questions are central to the Special Issue’s focus: 

• How can we approach weddings on a theoretical level as a rite de passage?
• Which norms and values form the basis of historical and contemporary wedding practices and representations?
• How is gender constructed in wedding practices understood as religious?
• Which social, political, cultural, and economic norms and values are expressed in religious wedding representations and practices? How do they change adapt and transform over time?
• How do wedding specialists and political–economic factors influence the performative dimensions of the rite de passage?
• What does the future of religious weddings look like?

Reference

Geertz, Clifford. Religion as Cultural System, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana Press, 1993.

van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Second edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Lebe, Reinhard. Ein Königreich als Mitgift: Heiratspolitik in der Geschichte. Bd. 30792. Dtv. München: DtTaschenbuch-Verl, 2000.

 Schäffler, Hilde. Ritual als Dienstleistung: die Praxis professioneller Hochzeitsplanung. Berlin: Reimer, 2012.

Williams, Lucy. Global Marriage: Cross-Border Marriage Migration in Global Context. Migration, Minorities & Citizenship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Witte, John. The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy. Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Dr. Marie-Therese Mäder
Dr. Anna-Katharina Höpflinger
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• weddings
• religions
• values
• norms
• mediatisation
• tradition
• transformation