Feminine, not feminist

Chapter 1 contextualizes the tradwife phenomenon in light of the widespread problematization of truth often understood to signal the onset of a “post-truth” era. It traces the continuities between trad futurism and a far-right “pro-truth” stance that draws a hard line between “facts” and “feelings” in order to associate conservatives with the former and liberals with the latter. Building off feminist theory that debunks the longstanding Western distinction between emotion/reason, it demonstrates how trad truth-making practices harness emotion to imbue the gender binary with a feeling of factuality rather than empirical proof. Unpacking trad women’s understanding of the tradlife as an apolitical lifestyle choice that works in their emotional self-interest, the chapter shows how this framing goes hand in hand with a postrace discourse that suggests racial inequality has been largely overcome – even while traces of white supremacy abound in trad networks. Finally, it considers how the popular trad motto “feminine, not feminist” mirrors and inverts liberal narratives of injury in suggesting feminism is preventing trad women from leaning into their natural, God-given inclinations to yield an aggrieved antifeminism.