Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective

On a stepping-stone to cultural intelligence: Textual/discursive analyses of media reception in cultural studies

“…The discussion features examples from a study of the discourse of British bridal magazines and of a qualitative analysis of the reception of the discourse by married or engaged women. The reception was accessed via semi-structured interviews in which a bridal magazine was used to prompt text interpretation and general media-related talk (Glapka, 2014).…”

“…The underlying idea of the analysis was that the semiosis takes place at both the productive and receptive sites of media discourse. Therefore, the study involved exploring both the magazines' discourse and readers' interpretation thereof (Glapka, 2014). One way of simplifying the relationship between media production and reception avoided in the analysis is the assumption of text-immanent meanings that yield the same understandings of media discourse.…”

“… 3. For extended discussion of interview data see (Glapka, 2014). Participants were assigned pseudonyms. …”

“You’ll Never Regret Going Bold”: The Moods of Wedding Apparel on a Practical Wedding

“…Their failure to attune is registered bodily, as Sara Ahmed describes, since mood and attunement are material and embodied processes (2014,17). Here APW relies on a feminist critique of the so-called wedding-industrial complex, including its media (Ingraham 1999(Ingraham /2008Engstrom 2012;Glapka 2014), which disarticulates nonnormative bodies and weddings. Both personal essays and reader comments regularly attest to the pain felt by those who sit outside of dominant bodily ideals and negotiate pressures to lose weight or otherwise conform to these ideals as a prerequisite to attunement; for them the wedding becomes a site of struggle and wedding mood is potentially unattainable.…”