Feeling at home online

Chapter 2 focuses on the interplay between trad women’s affective practices and the affordances of social media. Revisiting the interview between Mrs. Midwest and Yogi Oabs, it demonstrates how trad women’s intentional and unintentional actualizations of algorithmic affordances tie the tradlife to other prerogatives like eco-conscious and budget-friendly living. It further illustrates how this metapolitical truth-making impacts women’s embodied sense of self and troubles the commonplace distinction between online and offline. The degree of separation trad women experience between online/offline life is connected to their perception of the form of affective collectivity they become part of in aligning as trad on social media. Encapsulating the communal aspect of trad outreach under the heading of #femininefamily, a popular hashtag in trad networks during my fieldwork, the chapter demonstrates how the common denominator is not an experience of community in the traditional sense, but rather the feeling of not being alone in their adherence to trad gender norms. It ends by analyzing how trad women’s sense of being at home in trad networks relates to their actualization of social media to recursively embed public in private and private in public and grant themselves space to be present online.