Tradwives Against Capitalist-Cultural-Marxism: Gender, Economy, and Nation in US White Christian Nationalist Discourses

The white nationalist imaginary draws on settler colonial homestead, but expresses itself as the “native” tribe threatened by the neoliberal, globalist, Jewish elite. Similarly, they advance a religious, anti-modern vision which opposes neoliberal capitalism as globalist, consumerist and therefore feminized society, while at the same time supporting neoliberal economic policies as “biblical economics”. In these discourses anti-semitism and religiously grounded gender roles become the carbon monoxide of critique, absorbing anti-capitalist sentiment and articulating together nationalism and neoliberalism. Drawing on a on a multi-year blended ethnography, this paper explores the economic discourses of white Christian nationalist “tradwives” or women who explicitly endorse anti-feminism a way to bring about a strong, white, Christian nation and their opposition to the “great reset” – a conspiracy around the world economic forum’s development plan. Following on other mixed methods research in sociolinguistics (eg Baker & Levon 2015) which blends semiotic analysis of social media (Delfino 2021) with digital data analysis (e.g. Eberhardt 2022), I first use a dataset of 899 accounts to trace the ideological contours, and then deepen the interpretation with a close semiotic analysis of two tradwives’ social media content. I find that the apparent contradictions between a religious traditionalism and a capitalist modernism are resolved a return to so called “traditional gender roles”, through conspiratorial discourses of “cultural Marxism which blames Judaism for feminism, and feminism for late capitalism – “I used to earn enough money to own a woman” turning from capital to the social roles of postwar capitalism. This is expressed in their discourses in a particular notion of feminine beauty as submission to men, a vision of cosy domesticity which encodes and advertise fascism. Looking at the ways in which gender, but also sex, beauty and domesticity are used to create nostalgic, white nationalist imaginaries which renew and absorb opposition to capital, can also provide insights into the way these can be disarticulated. More precisely, it opens up spaces for a critical beauty, in which aesthetics are used first to highlight these ideological contours and processes connection, but then to interrupt them – to challenge the smooth association of beauty with the rigid hierarchies of the right whether that be between men and women which seem them beauty as femininity and submission, or which shapes the figure of the mother of the nation, the rigid scaling of family and nation. Baker, Paul, and Erez Levon. "Picking the right cherries? A comparison of corpus-based and qualitative analyses of news articles about masculinity." Discourse & Communication 9, no. 2 (2015): 221-236. Delfino, Jennifer B. "White allies and the semiotics of wokeness: Raciolinguistic chronotopes of white virtue on facebook." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31, no. 2 (2021): 238-257. Eberhardt, Maeve. “‘You Probably Have a Parasite’: Neoliberal Risk and the Discursive Construction of the Body in the Wellness Industry.” Language in Society, 2022, 1–23. doi:10.1017/S0047404522000409. Tebaldi, Catherine. "Make Women Great Again: women, misogyny and anti-capitalism on the right." Fast Capitalism(2021).