Anti-feminisms, Authoritarianism, and Digital Culture: A Pedagogy Project

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.