This is a groundbreaking study of our culture's obsession with weddings. By examining popular films, commercials, magazines, advertising, television sitcoms and even children's toys, this book shows the pervasive influence of weddings in our culture and the important role they play in maintaining the romance of heterosexuality, the myth of white supremacy and the insatiable appetite of consumer capitalism. It examines how the economics and marketing of weddings have replaced the religious and moral view of marriage. This second edition includes many new and updated features including: full coverage of the wedding industrial complex; gay marriage and its relationship to white weddings and heterosexuality and demographics shifts as to who is marrying whom and why, nationally and internationally.

Two women, virtual strangers, sit hand-in-hand across a narrow table, both intent on the same thing - achieving the perfect manicure. Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure - from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, "The Managed Hand" finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.

An updated edition of a standard in its field that remains relevant more than twenty years after its original publication. More than twenty years ago, sociologist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Arlie Hochschild set off a tidal wave of conversation and controversy with his bestselling book, "The Second Shift" In it, she examined what really happens in dual-career households. Adding together time in paid work, child care, and housework, she found that working mothers put in a month of work a year more than their spouses. Updated for a workforce now half female, this edition cites a range of new studies and statistics and includes a new afterword in which Hochschild assesses how much-and how little-has changed for women today.

An examination of dating app culture in China, across user demographics—straight women, straight men, queer women, and queer men.