Feminist sentimentalism? Ambivalent feeling in inclusive digital wedding media

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article traces textual sentimentalism on popular, feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding. In dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s work on sentimentalism as essentially apolitical and with feminist reclamations of the sentimental, it examines whether A Practical Wedding develops a feminist sentimentalism. Juxtaposing two of the blog’s foundational genres, the real wedding feature and the advice column, it excavates the blog’s invocations of the convivial, communal feeling that typically animates sentimentalism, setting them alongside an opposing archive of interpersonal boundary-making. Ultimately the blog epitomizes the ambivalence that some critics detect at the root of sentimentalism: A Practical Wedding’s real weddings hold up the wedding as a fantastical site of redemption, but this is countered by the unending return of political despair, frustration and rage in the advice columns. The result is a feminist sentimentalism as a specific offshoot of the moods of disappointment that pervade feminism.