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Abstract
This dissertation examined the figure of the bride in American media. Today, the bride is a ubiquitous figure. She graces the covers of magazines, websites are devoted to her, and multiple television series star her. This study aimed to understand the American bride contemporarily and historically by examining magazine media from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as todays reality television programming. Pulling from feminist media studies and critical cultural studies and proceeding from the standpoint that representations matter, portrayals of the bride were analyzed in terms of gender, class and race for ways in which these representations affirmed and/or resisted the dominant ideology. The bride was examined in media targeted at women to understand how media meant for women talked about the bride, a uniquely female figure. The nineteenth-century womens magazine Godeys Ladys Book, the twentieth-century womens magazine Ladies Home Journal and todays most notorious reality bride show, Bridezillas, were all examined.