The #Tradwife Persona and the Rise of Radicalized Domesticity

Abstract

The “momosphere”—a collection of parenting, relationship, cooking, and crafting blogs and social media—has seen exponential growth during the socially distant pandemic years. It has also seen the rise of a new domestic online persona: the “tradwife.” These #tradwives write blogs and social media posts that promote “traditional” gender roles and family life, wherein the man provides for and protects the family, and the woman has children and takes care of the needs of the family. To combat the obvious critiques of misogyny, many self-identified tradwives use feminist rhetoric to frame the movement as a choice they are making about how to live their own lives as empowered women. But the problematic nature of tradwife identity can go beyond issues of gender roles and into radical white supremacy. While these tradwives do not always identify as alt-right and/or white nationalists themselves (though some do), they are often accompanied by either overtly white supremacist content, hashtags that signal allegiance to white supremacist hate groups (e.g., #thirdposition, #14words, #1488), or through associated profiles of followers. Focusing on three well-known tradwife profiles, this article applies the five dimensions of online persona (Moore, Barbour, and Lee 2017), to unpack the construction of tradwife persona. As the profiles widen their networks to include multiple platforms and expanding lists of followers, they reveal different possible paths that the tradwife persona can take, and how online identities—public, mediatized, performative, collective, and intentional—can contribute to the process of extremist radicalization through their personas alone.