‘I Do Down-Under’: Naturalizing Landscapes and Love through Wedding Tourism in New Zealand

Abstract

This paper examines the importance of place for wedding tourism. A focus on tourist weddings offers a unique opportunity to examine critically the ways in which wedding rituals rely on ‘natural’ landscapes to produce ‘down-under’ weddings. Drawing on material from a New Zealand television documentary ‘I do down-under’, New Zealand wedding tourism websites and brochures, plus interviews with wedding tourism operators, I offer an analysis of New Zealand destination weddings. I suggest that heteronormative tourist weddings and New Zealand landscapes constitute each other as ‘natural’, 100% pure, exotic and romantic. Landscapes such as white glaciers, rugged mountains, lush green subtropical forests, blue water coastlines and golden beaches are promoted as part of the wedding package. In turn these moral geographies of tourist weddings naturalize and romanticize heterosexuality. Furthermore, the landscape takes on the role of family and friends who are ‘escaping’ down-under to marry. Throughout this paper I employ moral geographies and feminist poststructuralist theories to show that heterosexuality and nature spaces have no ontological or fixed status apart from the various acts which constitute their realities. Wedding tourism, therefore, is a useful lens through which to highlight the production of heterosexual bodies and spaces.