Wedding Reality TV Bites Black: Subordinating Ethnic Weddings in the South African Black Culture

Abstract

Black South Africans generally celebrate two types of weddings, one white and the second ‘traditional.’ This article uses the political economy theory and draws from multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the televisual representation of these two types of weddings. Analyzed here are 10 episodes of two South African wedding reality programs, Our Perfect Wedding and Top Billing Weddings. The analysis reveals that South African wedding reality television programs displace cultural diversity and stay within the strategy of reproducing sameness by dominantly focusing on white weddings. From this perspective, ‘traditional’ weddings are backgrounded. In addition, natural black hair is erased as the shows consistently feature brides with chemically processed or store-bought hair rather than the brides' own natural hair. This article argues that white weddings and White feminine looks are normalized as attractive, while blackness is either erased or represented as inferior.