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.

Shelley Cobb is Associate Professor in Film and English at the University of Southampton, UK. Her research interests center on women and contemporary media culture. She is the author of Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (2014) and has published on women directors, celebrity culture, chick-flicks, film adaptation, and breast cancer culture. She is the principal investigator of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary UK Film Culture, 2000 – 2015.’

Neil Ewen is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Winchester, UK. His research concerns cultural politics, particularly in the realms of sport and celebrity. His writing has appeared in various academic publications, and he is currently preparing a monograph on soccer, affect, and national identity in England.