Ms Christyana Bambacas
Christyana is undertaking a PhD in the English Department and Department of Social Inquiry. Her thesis is situated within feminist cultural studies discourses. It critically analyses the construction of white weddings in, through and by popular and public discourses. In particular, her thesis investigates how popular culture invites girls to aspire to ideals of the bride, wife and mother through the planning and performance of the white wedding and the practise of constructed traditions associated with the wedding. Her thesis also investigates how weddings reinforce cultural norms such as heterosexuality, monogamy, prescribed gender roles and Australian-ness.
The White Wedding Dress
The bride is marked and identified by popular discourses, as a bride, by the wearing of a particular genre of wedding dresses. Popularly constructed images of the wedding dress are commonly white, or different shades of white such as cream, ivory and so forth. The proliferation of images of white wedding dresses are disseminated en masse through, by and in a cross section of popular mediums such as film, television, women's magazines, wedding magazines and planners, bridal stores and fairs, fashion parades, pamphlets and photos. White wedding dresses must be crucially distinguishable and identifiable from bridesmaids dresses and everyday clothing through the exclusivity of their style, the fabric, the expense and accessories such as the headgear (veil, hat, tiara) gloves and jewellery. The white wedding dress, symbolically central to the white wedding through its mass dissemination in popular culture and bridal stores, appears to participate in the homogenisation of brides, weddings, love and marriage within different social, cultural and economic groups in Australia. This paper explores how popular discourses construct the white wedding dress as a marker of the white wedding and how girls are invited to aspire to ideal wedding through the consumption of the white wedding dress.
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