First Comes Love

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.