Yale Divinity School
Elinor Itin is a first-year student at Yale Divinity School, pursuing a Masters in Religion with a concentration in Ecology. Her studies focus on the intersection of gender & sexuality, technology, ecology, and spirituality. Prior to Divinity School, she worked in accommodations, neurodiversity advocacy, and product inclusion at Google. She received a BA in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies from Middlebury College.
In an economy of choice that monetizes our attention, what gives the #TradWife movement traction? In this paper, I explore how social media’s algorithmic dexterity enables the circulation and consumption of trad wives’ aspirational lifestyle images. I argue that their content not only emulates a romanticized Frontier aesthetic but mirrors principles of settler colonialism in the digital ecosystem. I explore how algorithmic colonization, data mining, and surveillance capitalism work through trad wives’ social media presence to further Evangelical, Right Wing political agendas. Likewise, I question the role of tech moguls, like multibillionaire Elon Musk, who openly advocate for a regressive gender politic while controlling much of the world’s digital infrastructure. The paper examines how Musk is part of a growing landscape of powerful, "secular" men who align with the Far Right’s obsession with declining birth rates and the moral obligation to have children. I conclude by warning against the dangers to self-formation that come from the seemingly benign consumption of trad wife content given the ways it both explicitly and implicitly advocates for the relegation of women to the narrow trappings of a #TradWife life while men continue in their Empire building projects.