The Perfect Bride, the Perfect Wedding: Constructing Femininity in Wedding Reality Television

• In Event: 324 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. RGC, Representations, and Inequality

Abstract

This project addresses the ways in which two wedding aesthetic reality television programs, Bridalplasty and Shedding for the Wedding, construct a standard of femininity, bridal beauty and bodily discipline as moderated by race and class in their content. The study considers the ways in which wedding perfection is inscribed in women’s bodies through extreme methods of discipline, including plastic surgery and weight loss, and the operations of both the culture industry and the beauty myth within the context of the American wedding ritual specifically. The paper also addresses the male gaze, rhetoric of perfection, rhetoric of inadequacy, a gendered division of labor, and homosocial competition in relation to the “perfect bride” role. Through content analysis, this project illuminates the ways in which the wedding serves as a site for extreme bridal bodily discipline and discusses the implications of this bodily discipline in relation to gender, race, and class, in the context of the wedding ritual, and as relates to discourses of feminism and popular culture.

Author

• Gillian Gualtieri, University of California-Berkeley