Sourdough Politics: Mother Hens, Milk Maids, and Masculinist Protection

• In Event: Masculinity as a Political Force

Abstract

Black feminists alongside decolonial and beyond-the-West feminist scholars have long identified the constitutive and productive relationship between white women and white supremacy. In recent years, attention has increasingly been called towards one particular platform where this relationship is made clear: the online tradwife movement. An emerging internet subculture, the tradwife movement espouses traditional gender roles, patriotism, religious purity, a nostalgia for the past, and a white epistemological framework reliant on norms and experiences steeped in the logics of white supremacy. While the literature thus far has highlighted the overlapping logics between tradwife and white supremacist ideologies, we trace popular tradwife social media accounts to make the case in this paper that these overlapping logics are a vehicle for sustaining particular patriarchal violences. Engaging Iris Marion Young’s ‘logic of masculinist protection,’ we offer a framework for understanding how patriarchy and white supremacy are entangled in tradwife ideologies in such a way that justifies violent, gendered nationalisms. Tradwife culture obscures this violence and masks its own troubling logics in aesthetically pleasing social media platforms filled with pictures of flowers, bread recipes, and children playing with baby farm animals. In that way, we aim to shed light on the alarmingly mundane ways that the tradwife movement sustains violence.

Authors

• Kara Ann Hooser, University of Chicago

• Emma Mieke Elisabeth van den Aakster