Pearl Nationalism: Tradwives and the Chronotopes of Femininity

This article looks at how gendered chronotopes of tradition are created in the work of four tradwives, or digital influencers who describe themselves as “feminine not feminist.” It first shows how each tradwie animates a distinct, highly mediatized, chronotope of tradition ranging, from the 1850s homestead to the 1950s suburban wife in pearls. Each uses submissive gender roles to create a unique vision of a past as domestic idyll embodied by a desirable woman: glowing, warm, beautiful, white. In a second step, it looks at how each of these individual chronotopes of tradition are aligned in a higher chronotope of absolute femininity. Like a string of pearls, femininity becomes a thread on which each individual chronotope becomes coeval, tokens of a type of absolute womanhood, atavistic tradition, “pearl nationalism.” In the third section, I explore how a chronotope of femininity is shaped through contrast to chronotope of feminist modernity. Rather than evoking a particular place, tradition means a woman returned to hers. The paper concludes with what a study of tradwives’ feminine chronotopes can contribute to understanding of chronotopes in mass media, and in particular to the growing appeal of the far right.