Description
In recent years, there has been a rise in #Tradwife content on social media platforms, a lifestyle where cis-women embrace patriarchal gender norms and identities such as the stay-at-home mother and homemaker. By encouraging women to return to what is conceptualised as ‘traditional’ lifestyles, these accounts argue that ciswomen will live more satisfactory and fully realised lives. We argue that the rejection of feminist ideas of modern womanhood needs to be understood in the context of the settler colony where these accounts occur. By understanding the settler colony as a creative structure that inherently needs maintenance, we can understand how contemporary acts function to reaffirm the racialised and gendered structures that provide the foundation for the settler colony. This paper examines TikTok as a haven for such discourse and analyses the underlying logics that govern this phenomenon. Specifically, we examine the intersection of traditional gender roles, reproductive futurism, and colonial nostalgia within the hashtag #Tradwife on the social media platform TikTok. Through qualitative content analysis (QCA), our research scrutinises how #Tradwife influencers in settler colonies like the USA and Australia (re)produce anxieties surrounding the temporality of masculine, heteronormative, colonialist values.
