Back to the Future? The Tradwives movement and the new forms oc conservative consensus building

This paper aims to explore the ‘Tradwives’ movement, a small but growing community led by a number of online mentors whose motivational support is both eloquent and prolific. As the name suggests, Traditional wives believe that a woman’s place is in the home and that men and women should embody the distinct yet complementary roles of breadwinner/homemaker. By investigating a Corpus made up of approximately 3,500 tweets and drawing upon a hybrid methodology integrating tools from Corpus-based Discourse Analysis and SFL applied to the communicative language adopted across the Twitter platform, the array of different discourses, opinions, values, and ideologies which surround and characterize the modern day ‘Tradwife’ is explored. The wider scope of this research is also to identify, within the dynamics enacted in the context under examination, an upsurge of traditionalist if not reactionary values. The authors consider the Tradwives’ social media discourses representative of a system of values which is insidiously finding ways to spread and circulate through alternative channels therefore fuelling and propagating the alt-right ideology.