Introduction

A woman wanders through everyday surrounds in her strapless and full-skirted white wedding gown. The photographs of this bride, which are produced by Alley Kat Photography and posted to Rock n Roll Bride and Flickr, depict her shopping for groceries, pumping gas, browsing in a video store, and cleaning clothing at a Laundromat. ¹ She is also the “Bride of Frankenstein” with white streaks in her upswept hair and a white face “stitched” onto her neck. ² These photos depict “just a day in the life of Frankenstein’s misses!” ³ Kat from the Rock n Roll Bride blog wryly suggests that these pictures and the filmic narratives associated with the bride of Frankenstein reference and distort normative ideas about women. ⁴ The images rely on cultural features of brides while conceptually undoing the heterosexual and reproductive futures that are ordinarily related to weddings because the Frankensteinian bride does not really have a “life.” According to varied stories, she has just been electrically animated, is deathly or dead white, is stitched together from human parts rather than having been born a woman, and is about to die.