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The Sawyer Seminar Series: Birthing the Nation presents a Digital Seminar: Robert Topinka

The Sawyer Seminar Series: Birthing the Nation presents a Digital Seminar: Robert Topinka

“Of Boss Babes and Baby Makers: Tradwives as Reactionary Feminists”

Tradwives perform a distinctly cisgendered, heteronormative, patriarchal and racialized form of domesticity. But redescribing tradwives in the language of critical theory is insufficient, if accurate. It might also be a tactical mistake: In the hustle culture logic of social media, haters make for good content, and tradwives often convert criticism into a story about bravely standing up for tradition in an all-too-modern world. This paradoxical combination of rugged individualism with ‘traditional’ feminine submissiveness has helped tradwives tap into a monetizable audience – one that isn’t uniformly white – all while disavowing politics. Taking tradwives seriously, if not quite at their word, I argue that tradwives are ideological entrepreneurs who develop a novel form of reactionary feminism, one where the freely chosen commitment to the ‘natural’ inequality of the sexes offers both a refuge from and critique of late capitalist immiseration.

Robert Topinka is senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He researches how reactionary digital politics shape public culture. He was co-investigator on an AHRC-funded project on the rhetoric and ideology of the ‘alt-right’ and principal investigator on the British Academy-funded project ‘Misinformation in Everyday Life: Portable Principles for Blending Qualitative and Quantitative Social Media Research.’ His work has appeared in Theory & Event, New Media & Society, Big Data & Society and elsewhere. He is co-author with Alan Finlayson and Cassian Osborne-Carey of Ideological Entrepreneurs: Politics, Rhetoric and Intellectuals in the Digital Age, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Please reach out to Hazel Velasco Palacios hgv5008@psu.edu if you have any questions about the event or need accommodations.

Virtual Event
Photo of Robert Topinga lecturing.
Photo of Robert Topinga lecturing.

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