Abstract

This article critically examines the rise of “tradwife” content across social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels, where traditional gender roles are reimagined as aspirational, aestheticized, and monetizable lifestyles. Drawing from Angela McRobbie’s theory of neoliberal feminism, Sara Ahmed’s work on affective economies—which examines how emotions circulate, attach to objects, and shape collective attachments—and Abraham Maslow’s notion that capacities can become needs, the study interrogates how domestic submission is reframed as a form of empowerment and self-actualization. Using a multimodal analysis of visual and narrative content, the article explores how tradwife influencers employ highly stylized aesthetics, vintage fashion, pastel-hued domestic interiors, and soft-spoken voiceovers to frame obedience and homemaking as desirable forms of feminine labor. This visual grammar is unpacked through three thematic lenses: historical lineage, visual semiotics, and affective economies. The analysis traces the ideological roots of the tradwife persona to 1950s domestic propaganda, second-wave anti-feminist backlash, and religious nationalism, situating it within broader histories of gender discipline. Further, the article argues that these performances of domesticity exploit contemporary anxieties around gender, labor, and identity. They offer emotional rewards such as comfort, nostalgia, and belonging while masking patriarchal norms beneath a veneer of choice and personal branding. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps illuminate how these digital performances conflate self-expression with submission, turning internal capacities into marketed needs. Ultimately, the tradwife trend reveals how algorithmic culture, neoliberal ideologies, and affective economies converge to reshape femininity as both a product and a performance, one that threatens to reverse feminist gains under the guise of aesthetic self-fulfillment.