Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

Final Project

Course Title

WSS 690 MA Final Project

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Chair

Barbara Sutton

Committee Member(s)

Elliot Tetreault

Abstract

This project began, broadly, with my exposure to TikTok’s tradwives—a subset of content creators and influencers who advocate traditional gender roles as women, homemakers, wives, and mothers, with a particular focus on moral and religious beliefs and aesthetic practices of “womanhood.” To me, tradwives encapsulated the internet’s capacity to weaponize subtly: slow-paced, pastel videos, gentle music, and even gentler voices delivering increasingly extreme ideas about masculine and feminine roles, Christian nationalism, and white supremacy. But other threads began to appear as I delved deeper into the world of tradwives. I noticed the men’s rights groups who praised tradwives while openly degrading women as a singular category, the wellness and new age influencers often cited and reshared by tradwife accounts, and the ever-increasing presence of anti-trans rhetoric and condemnation of “gender ideology.” It seemed to me that tradwives—knowingly or unknowingly—were operating within a much larger web of online content that at its core relies on the promotion of bioessentialism and white supremacy.

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