Performing Care, Producing Value: Trad-Entrepreneurial Labour in the Indian Context

This paper interrogates the growing phenomenon of Indian women who perform reproductive and care labour on social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. From choreographed household chores to stylised cooking tutorials, these digital performances transform historically invisible “women’s work” into aestheticised, monetizable content. Drawing on feminist social reproduction theory, studies of digital labour, and insights on neoliberal empowerment, the paper situates the Indian case in dialogue with—but also in contrast to—the Western “tradwife” phenomenon. To understand this novel phenomenon, the paper introduces the concept of “trad-entrepreneurial labour” to describe this sui generis form of digital labour unfolding in the Indian context. Trad-entrepreneurial labour fuses the performance of tradition-bound domestic femininity with entrepreneurial self-branding on digital platforms. It is aspirational, affective, visible, hope(ful), and entrepreneurial, but distinct in that it commodifies reproductive labour itself rather than adjacent creative industries like fashion, travel, among others. In doing so, trad-entrepreneurial labour complicates longstanding feminist critiques of capitalism’s reliance on the invisibility of unpaid care: platforms now thrive on its hyper-visibility, while rewarding only particular, classed, caste-coded, and algorithmically legible performances. By theorising trad-entrepreneurial labour as a new articulation of digital reproductive labour, the paper contributes to feminist political economy and media studies by showing how capitalism’s appropriation of care is being reconfigured in India. It raises critical questions about the blurred boundaries between doing and performing care, empowerment and exploitation, and tradition and entrepreneurship under platform capitalism.