First Comes Love : Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics

With the prominence of one-name couples (Brangelina, Kimye) and famous families (the Smiths, the Beckhams), it is becoming increasingly clear that celebrity is no longer an individual pursuit-if it ever was. Accordingly, First Comes Love explores celebrity kinship and the phenomenon of the power couple: those relationships where two stars come together and where their individual identities as celebrities become inseparable from their status as a famous twosome.

Taken together, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways these alliances are bound up in wider cultural debates about marriage, love, intimacy, family, parenthood, sexuality, and gender, in their particular historical contexts, from the 1920s to the present day. Interdisciplinary in scope, First Comes Love seeks to establish how celebrity relationships play particular roles in dramatizing, disrupting, and reconciling often-contradictory ideas about coupledom and kinship formations.

“First Comes Love is one of the very finest edited collections that I have had the pleasure of reading. Its examination of celebrity couples is complex, diverse, provocative and challenging. Whether this be an examination of golden couple Brangelina, or the undressing of the gilded garments of Garbo and Gilbert, the book traverses the way celebrity couples are engaged with historically, textually, and globally. Each chapter is a critical delight, the footprints immaculately chosen, and the arguments and illustrations intricate and delicate in equal measure. Beautiful.” —Sean Redmond, Associate Professor of Media and Communication, Deakin University, Australia.

“From Lombard and Gable to Brangelina and the Kardashian clan, power couples and famous families have occupied public attention while until now mostly evading analytical scrutiny. In First Comes Love, Shelley Cobb and Neil Ewen-or, as they may soon be known, Sheneil-bring together a sharp, lively crew of scholars, whose smart takes on celebrity couples and kin, and on topics ranging from racial politics and same-sex marriage to aging and neoliberalism, open new pathways in celebrity studies.” —Joshua Gamson, Professor of Sociology, University of San Francisco, USA, and author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America