"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"

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