The rage of tradwives: Affective economies and romanticizing retreat

In the contemporary media landscape, the ‘tradwife’, part of a burgeoning movement of women who document their activities on social media, sends a deceptively simple message: happiness for women is to be found in caring for and submitting to one's husband, having and raising children and keeping a tidy and comfortable home. Tradwives have captured the attention of a broad media audience, with popular articles speculating on the purpose of tradwives and their politics. The media representation of tradwives is not new, though it has reached a specific form of political visibility in the current digital mediascape. Variously disenchanted with corporate feminism, the national care crisis and the devaluation of reproductive labour, a large cohort of women are expressing online a yearning for an alternative vision of a fulfilling life that involves pastoral fantasies and a reactive heteronormativity. Yet, we argue that while tradwives perform happiness and serenity for their online audience, they also perform a different kind of affect: rage. They often express themselves in terms that are, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, fuelled by fury aimed at what they perceive to be regressive change. Tradwives adopt moralist and moralizing values such as faith, femininity, lifestyle and heterosexual marriage, and often direct their anger at the systemic failures of corporate feminism. In this article, we position tradwives within an analytic of the ‘mirror world’, where tradwives and feminists respond in very different ways to a broken system. Both positionings, we argue, revolve around particular iterations of women's rage, but the consequences of the rage differ: feminist rage is directed at the ways in which the broken system discriminates against women as a group and calls for collective struggles to this inequity; tradwife rage is directed at their individual experiences with the broken system and encourages individual retreat rather than collective change.