Reading South African Bridal Television: Consumption, Fantasy and Judgement

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the popular South African reality television (TV) programme Our Perfect Wedding (Mzansi Magic 2013–) with a particular focus on the way the show re-frames the wedding, centralising the couple as a site for the performance of freedom through consumption. The article argues that the intimate values of love and romance are coded in terms of both a post-apartheid and a post-feminist discourse of freedom through conspicuous consumption. Like much global reality TV, Our Perfect Wedding reframes the traditions of the wedding as an exercise in choice and success for the brides. At the same time the wedding is figured a site for the demonstration of taste, social mobility and success through consumption for black middle-class South Africans who are seen as newly able to afford such spending. Like much global reality TV fair, the show addresses class as a process of ‘self-making’ in line with the ‘middle-class domestic normative’ (Skeggs, Wood and Thumin 2005, 12). Finally, the article contends that the show presents a double-coded address in relation to class. Our Perfect Wedding celebrates a fantasy of bridal ‘perfection’, as the confirmation of middle-class success, while simultaneously encouraging viewers to judge the couples onscreen for their conspicuous performances of wealth, and to relish those moments where ‘wedding perfection’ and, by extension, class mobility fails.