White Nationalist Lacey Lynn, wearing lipstick and pearls, reclines in on a padded headboard.  In a whisper somewhere between sexy and girlish, she relates her rejection of civic nationalism, women’s suffrage. Yes, all feminism she giggles, her gaze demure yet flirtatious.  A commenter on her video thanks her for giving him hope he can get a right wing girlfriend.

In this seminar, I will look at the language of Trad wives across 9 YouTube videos. These antifeminist and white nationalist women, with names like Blonde in the Belly of the Beast, share their conversion stories in bedroom confessional videos that blend right wing politics and sex. Like Hall’s (1995) phone sex workers, they use submissive speech to attract paid subscribers, and movement members. These videos build metapolitical intimacy (Maly 2020)  — enticing with performances of white (nationalist) femininity, playing traditionalists calling for strong men to save them from the threat of globalist, feminist hegemony.

To understand how #trad women’s speech supports white nationalism, I draw on Inoue’s (2004) work on indexical inversion and the fetishization of women’s voice.  The fetishization of  women’s speech inverts an indexical order to link the nation to gender and racial order; masculinity is modernity, femininity is tradition. Metapragmatic narratives of women’s speech normalize this inversion, and tell a naturalized history of nation and modernity as gendered.

Women on the far right, as part of a project of revalorizing white masculinity (Kelly 2017) by celebrating western civilization as men’s creation and romantic gift (Mattheis 2017), consciously deploy both gendered narratives and women’s or submissive speech. Through metapragmatic narratives of feminists as failed men, competitive, mean, and ugly, they voice a racially impure, illegitimate, modern order.  Their own voices right this gender, and national disorder, performing white purity, traditionalism and submission so that men can perform modernity and dominance.  As their guidebook, Fascinating Womanhood (Andelin 1963), explains, women should reclaim the angelic qualities of delicacy and gentleness to inspire noble masculinity and lifelong love— because women must maintain a white civilization.

I understand these performances. I’ve tried them. I was raised by a traditionalist mother, who has since become an open white nationalist. These ideologies of femininity, whiteness, the reframing of white male supremacism as romance, are part of my own socialization and embodiment. Watching her, I saw how closely interwoven white femininity and white supremacy are.

Blee (2004) notes that women serve an important function in recruiting and retaining white supremacists, and it is important to understand how this functions on the digital right.

This seminar will exploret tradwives performances of feminine language and how these support their broader white nationalist platform, with the broader aim of understanding the ways in which white supremacy is made to seem desirable, domestic, or romantic.

Presenter: Ibrahim Al Khateeb

Date: 9^th October, 2018

1. Where does the term come from?

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