Promising Images · Promising Images of Love. The Mediatisation of Values and Norms in Religious and Secular Wedding Narratives

Promising Images of Love. The Mediatisation of Values and Norms in Religious and Secular Wedding Narratives

Digital and electronic media are pivotal in wedding rituals, whether it's during the preparation, the ceremony itself, or afterward. Wedding photographers orchestrate the couple's moments during the ceremony and reception. These portrayals influence the memories of the wedding couple and their guests in the future. Weddings are understood as a constitutive rite de passage that is commonly practiced in religious traditions as well as in a variety of cultural and secular contexts. Wedding practices shape and communicate the gender, social, cultural and economic norms and values of individuals and groups. The project scrutinizes how media representations and practices enclose and reshape religious and secular norms and values as well as stereotypes. This interdisciplinary study draws on theories from the study of religion, cultural studies, media ethics and applies a multi-methodological approach. The field work includes participatory observation, the analysis of wedding shows, and narrative-biographical video recorded interviews with 27 married couples in Switzerland, Italy and Germany. The research increases social awareness of the power of images (that express hierarchical relationships among individuals, genders and in religions), in order to strengthen a more inclusive, secure, innovative, and reflective European society and culture, to improve respect and to prevent subordination. The aim of the research is: (1) To understand how media transform religious and secular institutions like churches, civil registry offices, wedding photographers, and commercial service providers. The following multimedia presentation presents the different institutions involved in weddings: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lfQCqgPj0k). (2) To analyse the role of photos and videos to remember the wedding day, specifically the religious and secular ceremony. The question of gender is addressed as an analytical framework. Building on the mediatisiation of weddings, the third research goal (3) considers the norms and values expressed in the dynamic among the ceremony location, the couple getting married, and their guests referred to as “locationship”. The research concludes that the mediatisation of weddings blends the religious with the secular sphere. Wedding media practices strengthen the feeling of belonging to a community that transcends cultural-religious identities. In the production, taking photos and videos becomes part of the religious and secular rite of passage’s collective memory that connects the individual couples. In the reception the memory of the wedding is homogenised through the representational norms of the wedding photos. The representational norms of wedding photos highlight the triangle between the couple, their guests, and the location, the so called "locationship". In this triangle religious and secular norms and values are further blended.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union