TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media

Abstract

In recent years, social media platforms have seen a growing promotion of the Tradwife’s lifestyle, where cis women embrace patriarchal gender norms and identities such as the stay-at-home mother and homemaker. By encouraging young women to return to ‘traditional lifestyles’, these accounts argue that cis women will live more satisfactory lives. We argue that misogynistic influencer culture is not an exclusive output of masculine actors and that feminine content creators in the ‘womanosphere’ often play significant roles in rejecting feminist ideas of womanhood, particularly for young people. This paper examines TikTok as a haven for such discourse and analyses the underlying logics that govern this phenomenon. Our research ultimately asks, how do Tradwife influencers contribute to normalizing far-right, anti-feminist ideologies on social media? Specifically, we examine the intersection of traditional gender roles, reproductive futurism, and colonial nostalgia within the hashtag #Tradwife on TikTok to perpetuate these ideals.

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