DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/GNB6-JH84
Defense Date
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Caddie Alford
Second Advisor
Jennifer Rhee
Third Advisor
Harry Szabo
Abstract
This thesis traces the social-political influence of tradwife content on social media. More specifically, it deciphers the rhetorical phenomenon of revealing and concealing as represented and intensified in online tradwifery. Tradwives are cultural producers and promoters. Their displayed lifestyle performance not only obtains visibility but circulates far-right ideology. This project extends Carolyn R. Miller’s research on the rhetorical phenomenon of concealing and revealing to demonstrate that, in the context of US digitality, extremism emerges from displays of plainness and naturalness. While some tradwives engage in explicit extremism, this thesis examines the rhetorical strategies, tactics, and appeals tradwives apply to reconfigure the online publics they inhabit.
Influenced and influenced by algorithmic platforms, tradwives curate ideological enclosures around themselves and users to prompt a lifestyle replication based on gender role ideology. By manipulating platform affordances, everyday aesthetics, and users’ affective responses, tradwives rhetorically and strategically subvert and disrupt online publics for the manosphere and fascist propaganda.
Chapter One examines tradwives’ recursive relationships with algorithmic platforms. Through the application of technical affordances and practical knowledge of online trends, tradwives develop an algorithmic awareness that influences their “rhetoricking.” It is from these algorithmic interactions that they construct, as Taina Bucher coins, algorithmic imaginaries to conceal their political ideology and to prompt ideological enclosures. Chapter Two deciphers how tradwife aesthetics evoke affective appeals, which influences users into adopting the tradwife lifestyle. The chapter reveals two dominant forms of tradwife aesthetics: homestead aesthetics and the Proverbs 31 archetype. The aesthetic performances manipulate the perception of simplicity and scapegoat feminism and institutions as a common enemy. These feminized, political aesthetics are a gateway for political recruitment and mobilization, leading users to adopt and to replicate anti-feminist and anti-institution mindsets. Chapter Three culminates with a direct examination of the politics that inhere in tradwives’ actions. Through the application of spectacle, tradwives exploit social media platforms’ vast openness to formulate a national identity based on gender binarism, white supremacy, and anti-feminism. By exploiting platforms’ affordances, tradwives curate fascist propaganda that works in tandem with manosphere publics and amplifies users’ fears and anxieties to rupture democratic systems. This thesis reveals that tradwives deploy technical affordances and micro-aesthetics to produce a far-right ideology steeped in fascist and nationalist ends. Ultimately, this rhetorical response unveils how collectives manipulate individuals for their political, religious ideologies.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-1-2025
Included in
Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons, Social Media Commons, Women's Studies Commons