White Wedding Fairytales: (re)-reading the bridal traditions of bridal texts

The white wedding narrative of popular discourses concerns the ideal wedding and bridal moment. The bride is protagonist and 'star' of this fairytale, which begins with a marriage proposal, accompanied by a dashing groom and dazzling diamonds, and ends with 'happily ever after' for the bridal couple. Replete with the celebratory aspects of a rite of passage, the white wedding fairytale is characterised by bridal traditions, and an exhaustive list of etiquette requirements. Representations of 'real life' wedding fairytales (for example, the wedding of Mary Donaldson to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark) are circulated by Australian women's and gossip magazines. A context is thereby provided for the narratives constructed by the more specialised genre of bridal magazines and planners. The bride is invited by such texts to plan and perform a range of manufactured bridal traditions in the execution of the ideal wedding of popular discourses. Critical considerations of the white wedding have posited this ritual as a site for the reproduction of cultural norms and ideals, such as prescribed femininity, heterosexuality and 'whiteness'. The literature has typically focused on either cultural production (the wedding industry) or on cultural consumption (more general experiences of the wedding). Despite this polarity, studies tend to understand cultural power as dominative, romance ideology as manipulative, brides (consumers) as living in a state of false consciousness as passive consumers, and most importantly, cultural meaning as 'fixed' through the production process. This thesis draws from Stuart Halls seminal paper on televisual texts, reworking his encoding and decoding method towards a reading of womens and bridal publications. Bridal traditions are often reproduced, with little or no variation, and mass disseminated across a range of women's texts, encoding a preferred meaning/reading of these cultural practices. However, cultural meanings are not understood to be 'fixed' through the production process or passively consumed by the 'unsuspecting' masses. Departing from existing critical literature, cultural meanings are recast as contradictory, fluid, and open to interpretation. This thesis argues that in positing the white wedding fairytale as the preferred reading of cultural texts, one can query the idea that weddings reproduce hetero-normativity