ABSTRACT
This chapter explores media representations of Kate Middleton in the BBC coverage of the 2011 Royal Wedding, and its restaging and satirising in Channel 4 comedy The Windsors (2016–), as a means to think about the role of social class in the contemporary wedding spectacle. More specifically, it will consider how class as spectacle and wedding as spectacle come together in these representations through the figure of the “good” and the “bad” bride. The Windsors parodies media representations of Kate Middleton’s “commoner” background and supposed class mobility by figuring her as a “Gypsy bride”, drawing on pervasive stereotypes of “Gypsy” culture and classed, racialised, and gendered stigma. As such, the “Gypsy bride” is once again marshaled as a subject of symbolic violence and class disgust. Meanwhile, The Windsors figures the upper classes as relatively benign, and the jokes have little symbolic weight on their wealth and power. In so doing, both the BBC coverage of the Royal Wedding and its restaging in The Windsors essentially work to shore up existing structures of class power and classed moral economies.
