TRADWIVES AND FEMINAZIS

Traditional gender roles and the celebration of masculinity are key tenets in the alt-right ideology, an ideology embraced by an audience overwhelmingly consisting of heterosexual white men. However, there is a subset of women who also believe that a woman’s place is in the home and her role is to bear white children and care for her husband. These women are described by the neologism “tradwife” or “tradgirl,” and have spawned yet another Wojak meme variant, which first started circulating on 4chan in 2019. ¹ The tradwife meme depicts a blonde female Wojak wearing a sundress. In addition to the meme, vocal tradwife figures on social media platforms post images of performative femininity—homemade cakes and freshly pressed shirts, for example—under the hashtag #tradwife.

The tradwife stands in contrast to the “feminazi,” a pejorative portmanteau of “feminist” and “Nazi” popularized in the early 90s by conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh. The term has grown in popularity in recent years to describe feminists as militant, angry, man-hating women. The false equivalence drawn between feminists and Nazis is inteded to portray feminists as authoritarian and power-hungry, discrediting and demonizing the feminist cause. Like many alt-right concepts, the feminazi trope has been meme-ified and spread online on platforms such as 4chan. In these memes, posters cherry-pick “images of feminist women arguing with political opponents, and by capturing through a screenshot the moment when they appear the most irrational and angry, anonymous internet users at the inception of those internet memes create powerful enemy images. These images are then captioned, sometimes doctored or integrated within other popular internet memes, and spread via various social media to disseminate the idea that anger, irrationality, hatred of men, and feminism are all linked.” ²

The contrast between the portrayal of the serene tradwife and the outraged feminazi is an effective strategy of visual propaganda in the alt-right’s campaign of manipulative ideological cyberwarfare. These images champion alt-right values of traditional gender roles and attack feminist “dogma” as the cause of male oppression and the degradation of traditional conservative and religious values.