The Capitalism Studies Network invites you to its next seminar presentation.

A ‘tradwife’ is a popular social media figure who embodies an idealized aesthetic of wifehood, positioning their lives as a return to traditional gender roles within sanctified nuclear families. This talk discusses the tradwife media system as digital labor and as symptom of our age of polycrisis. We interpret tradwife content in relation to these conditions by highlighting specific tropes and tendencies in Instagram and TikTok videos and images. We argue that the tradwife’s emphasis on homeschooling and home cooking “from scratch” is part of the counterrevolution against public provision of social goods.

Dr Astrid Lorange is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design at UNSW Sydney, where she is a researcher in the Media Futures Hub and the Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice. She is one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, whose book of essays Homework was published by Discipline in 2021, a co-editor at Rosa Press, and a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network.

Sarah Brouillette is a Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of three books: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007); Literature and the Creative Economy (2014); and UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019). Her current research is about social media platforms and the feminization of work in publishing.