The Ideologies of ‘I Do’: Commodification, Consumption, and Identity in the Wedding Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigated the relationship between identity, commodification, and conspicuous consumption in the wedding industry; as well as how these ideologies are promulgated through the media. The broad aim was to contribute to the analysis of the wedding industry within the larger context of how bridal media both informs and reflects its cultural context. Weddingbells was used as a proxy for the wedding industry in Canada; to examine how it engaged cultural ideologies as it advised, and how it exemplified a commodified amalgamation of performance and identity. Wedding magazines function as curators of wedding trends and therefore serve as an example of the voice of the wedding industry. At its core, this project is a historical look at how magazines portrayed the performance and communication elements of a wedding and how that was indicative of a broader societal context, as well as the sheer tenacity of the commodified white wedding. It also offers a historical background of the modern conception of the wedding and outlines the establishment of the wedding industrial complex to allow a good understanding of the power encompassed by the wedding industry in manufacturing, retail, and publishing to better understand the analysis. The development of the editorial curation over a 10-year period (2003-2012) in Weddingbells was analyzed using a critical textual analysis — primarily a content analysis with a look at the rhetorical appeals presented in some of the data — industry-centric rather than the psychology of the reader. The theoretical framework used the theory of conspicuous consumption, spectacle, and theory of identity. The findings offer a unique perspective from a researcher that spent more than a decade in the industry, as well as a theoretical construct in the elevation of the term “white wedding” to encapsulate many of the most important concepts in this dissertation. This research offers valuable insight into the wedding industry at large, as well as indicators of its impact on Canadian culture. As a result, this study generates a new perspective on weddings as communication, what it means to commodify our identity, and weddings as an enactment of identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".