Feminism, anti-feminism and affective economies of rage
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Hello. Hello, good evening.

Welcome to this evening's event everyone. My name is Dr. Rachel O'Neill. I'm an assistant professor here in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE and I'm delighted to be chairing this evening's event which forms part of our department's public lecture program and is in fact the last of the series this year.

Thank you to everyone for coming along tonight, both in person and online, and also to all those who've been attending sessions throughout the series. We're incredibly fortunate to be joined this evening by two eminent feminist scholars. Professor Sarah-Bene Weiser joins us from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Walter H. Annenberg Dean and Lauren Berland Professor of Communication,

Professor Bennewiser is also the former head of department here at Median Communications and is always very warmly welcome back whenever she returns, which thankfully is most summers. Professor Bennewiser's work as a feminist media studies scholar spans a wide range of subject matter, from beauty pageants, personal favorite of mine, to Nickelodeon television, brand culture, to commodity activism.

In recent years, she has developed extremely generative analyses of the dense interrelations and insidious entanglements between popular feminism and popular misogyny. She has also, in co-authored work, pushed forward crucial new trajectories on the politics of believability, which I believe her paper will extend still further tonight. Responding to Professor Benny Wiser's talk will be Professor Angela McRobbie, Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London.

An icon of feminist sociology and cultural studies, Professor McRobbie is known for her unparalleled ability to survey the cultural landscape and discern key shifts in its overarching topography, most especially in relation to gender and sexual politics. It's a privilege and a pleasure to have both of these scholars with us tonight. Some general points before I hand over to our speakers.

First, please may I ask that you all ensure that your phones and any other devices are on silent to ensure that we do not disrupt this evening's proceedings. Second, in the event of a fire alarm, please vacate the room through the exits at the back of the theatre and then proceed to the assembly points outside the main entrance of the building. Finally, on format and timings, Professor Bene Wiser will speak for approximately 40 minutes, after which Professor McRobbie will offer a response of just under 10 minutes.

This evening's event is hybrid and as such once the talks conclude we'll take questions from those in the room and from those joining us remotely. Those attending online should be able to enter questions into the chat which is being monitored by our events manager Luam Tesle who is at the back thank you and to whom we owe enormous thanks for all the work that she has put into organizing tonight's proceedings. The event is being recorded and a podcast will hopefully be made available afterwards.

Now all that remains for me is to hand over to Professor Benny Weiser who will deliver her talk entitled Feminism, Anti-Feminism and Effective Economies of Rage. Please join me in welcoming her. Hi everyone, good evening.

Thank you, Rachel, for that introduction. Thank you, Angela, for being willing to be a respondent to this talk tonight. Thank you, all of you, for coming tonight. It's really, really great to be at the LSE. It's really, really great to not be in the United States. It's really great to be back in London.

It's a Thursday night at 6:30 and you all are here and it just was a great reminder of the incredibly vibrant intellectual community that London has to offer us. And so I'm so privileged to be here. I'm here in solidarity with all of us who remain committed

to the value of higher education, to research, to science, to teaching, to freedoms of all kinds, including academic freedom. So thank you for joining me tonight. My talk is based on some new work that I've been thinking about in terms of just trying to understand the kind of cultural politics of the moment. So with that, I will start with

picture of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. You're welcome. That's how I'm gonna start. A few months ago, the journalist, Megyn Kelly, gave a talk at the conservative political action conference and bizarrely, she spent most of her time talking about the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni case where the actress, if you don't know about this, has accused Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment on the movie set of

the movie "This Ends With Us," which is a movie about domestic violence.

Kelly is clearly obsessed with the case and her personal and mean-spirited grudge against Blake Lively allowed her to make the case that this was emblematic, that this particular case of two celebrities was emblematic of what she calls the left's lies and bullying. Indeed, she calls Lively, quote, the avatar of left overreach.

There's been lots of media coverage of the Blake Lively case, including a thorough investigative piece in the New York Times, who was subsequently named as a co-defendant in a 400 million dollar defamation suit by Baldoni against Lively and the Times, along with mainstream media, social media, gossip magazines, and others. There's been a hastily made documentary on HBO

And I've tried not actually to pay too much attention to this case. There's some other stuff happening. I don't know if you've heard, but there is some other stuff happening. And this just couldn't really capture my attention. But I can't deny some of the similarities between it and the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp case.

Both involved prominent celebrities, both involve accusations of sexual harassment or assault, both have attracted unbelievably disproportionate media attention, especially, again, when taking into consideration what else is happening in this world.

So I've written with Katherine Higgins about the Heard Depp case because we thought that that was a really great example of what we call the economy of believability in the context of media and sexual violence. I can't quite bring myself to write about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. So I've been thinking about why it is. What is my resistance to writing about this? I'm a media scholar. I'm a feminist. What is it that I just don't want to kind of dig my heels in?

And I think it's partly because the Heard Dep trial felt as if it were a residual effect from the Me Too movement. The testimonies in that case resonated with many of the claims that were being made at the time about Me Too. That it had gone too far, that she wasn't a perfect victim, that she was a liar.

But I think we've seen a cultural shift since her death, certainly not one that arose out of nowhere, but rather one that is the effect of a long duray of cultural politics that have to do with broader gender dynamics, including but not limited to sexual violence.

Contra Megyn Kelly, I don't think it is Blake Lively who is the avatar of leftist overreach in the contemporary cultural climate. I think it is feminism itself that has become this avatar and the target of far-right rage.

So in this talk I want to focus on this far-right rage represented in the constructed avatar of feminism and think through how this rage, this far-right rage engages in a mirror world with feminist rage. I'll provide some examples of those mirror worlds and hone in specifically on trad wives because they exhibit this far-right rage precisely through construing a feminist

avatar and then using this avatar as a target of their posts and their ideologies about gender. But first, let's think for a minute about what an avatar means. An avatar is a digital representation of a user, character, or person that can be used

to represent oneself online in various contexts, including in video games, social media, and virtual worlds. It can be a static image, it can be a cartoon character. In case you don't know, that's Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Beyonce. It can be a 3D model, right? It's often customizable to reflect personal preferences or online identities.

I'm suggesting here that a particular avatar of feminism has been created by far-right actors and circulated across multiple media platforms. This avatar has been customized to represent feminism as a series of lies, a grift, a scam, a con game.

While feminism has been demonized in many different ways over centuries, as Angela's important work over the years has reminded us, the idea that it is a lie and that it is just wrong, right? Or not just wrong. That it's not just a historical relic, but it is a manipulative con game seems to me to be a shift in its characterization.

This avatar of feminism as a lie and a scam is mirrored in what is apparently the true construction of womanhood. Idealized hetero femininity, commitment to a husband and children and keeping a home.

And so the current political and cultural climate has been a rich site for the construction of and attacks against a feminist avatar. When you listen to or when you view these attacks, the rage behind them is inescapable and palpable. Feminism has always been a threat to the status quo. This is not new, right? But the threat feels heightened and slightly shifted in this moment.

So the rage that I'd like to talk about today is part of the architecture of this feminist avatar and its alleged overreach. This rage is often performative, but it also has very real material effects, as we will see.

So rage and anger more generally has had a great deal of visibility in the past several years. We are in an age of anger. The media often laments the anonymous rage of the internet. We have rage baiting and now rage farming, which was kind of a new thing for me to think about.

There's been lots of attention paid to gendered rage. The rage of masculinity that far-right influencers such as Andrew Tate embody, the rage that is part of the radicalization of young men online that was captured poignantly in the recent Netflix series, Adolescence.

We've also seen a heightened visibility of both female rage and feminist rage. The construction of that feminist avatar that I have been talking about is positioned as an object of rage. And these forms of rage aren't reducible to one another, but they are all interconnected, I'm arguing. And we need to parse them to understand their relations to one another.

Writing about the media phenomenon of female anger in 2018, the reporter Leslie Jamison remarks, "Angry women are messier than angry men. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage. We are most comfortable with female anger when it promises to regulate itself, to refrain from recklessness, to stay civilized."

And it's precisely this messy anger that has mobilized different feminist practices over the past many decades where rage at inequity, at lack of autonomy, at gendered and racialized violence has motivated many to use rage as a way to challenge institutionalized and structural racism, sexism, and misogyny.

Scholars such as Amiya Srinivasan, Brittany Cooper, Carol Anderson, Soraya Chemly, to name but a few, have all examined the power of women's anger in a cultural and political era that seeks to remove that power. Rebecca Traister, for example, has powerfully demonstrated that women's anger has often been at the forefront of social movements against injustice, has often been the impetus for social change.

you know, 2017 but before and after with the heightened visibility of the #MeToo movement alongside a revitalized Black Lives Matter movement and other global movements that challenge social injustice, rage coursed through the veins of many and provided what Tracester calls a "new channel for women's furious drive."

This rage was symbolized in women's marches like the ones on the screen, televised testimonies where women's bodies were put on trial. The mechanisms of repression that had historically contained that messiness of women's anger at social, political, and economic asymmetries had, it felt like, been loosened even for a moment, even for a little bit.

And there was a newly felt anger, an effective economy of rage. This rage was intended to destabilize power relations. Yet, like most of us know, most efforts at destabilization, there are immediately counter mechanisms that move into action to try to contain and control this eruptive rage.

These counter mechanisms mirror some of the progressive themes of feminism, but distort them so that they retrench dominant relations of power, not challenge them.

As feminists on the street and on social media screamed, "Fuck the patriarchy," the patriarchy rages back with violence by reducing bodily rights, working to reinstate and reaffirm a version of femininity that despite its protestations is indeed shaped by rage, but not against patriarchy, but against feminism itself.

In other words, feminist rage and patriarchal counters to rage can be interpreted in a broader analytic of what I've been thinking about with different scholars and with the feminist media scholar, Julie Boyce Kay, who's here tonight, as mirror worlds. Rage emerges as a reaction to something. It's not inherently political.

in one direction or another. Rage can and often does engender more rage, a counter-rage, a mirroring of politics.

So, I've recently written a short piece with Jilly Kay on mirror worlds as an analytic to try to think through cultural politics of the current moment. We wrote that we feel like we're living in this time of mirror worlds in which topsy-turvy new social and political formations are taking shape. Reactionary movements absorb and mirror discourses from the left,

leading to perplexing new political alliances. In our contemporary mirror worlds, the familiar predicates of politics have been scrambled.

Gender politics in particular play out with force in the digital mirror world where we see a range of female-centric groups and influencers who have begun to mimic the rage-filled bio-essentialist logics of the manosphere, a kind of reflection of a reflection.

But mirrors do not simply reflect, but also refract. They can mimic a particular reality, but they can also bend and transform that reality. The mirror always transforms reality. In the mirror, we see the mirror image, which is not a pure image, but instead it's opposite. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the verb "to mirror" as to represent something honestly.

Although as any student of critical media studies knows, there never can be a neutral reflection of reality and language or media or culture. The dictionary's definition of the verb "refract" is to change the direction of light, sound, heat, or other energy as it travels across or through something.

And so, Gillie and I wrote that we might say as our contemporary energies, our fears, our rage, our desires, our politics, right, as they travel through the terrain of networked digital media, they're reshaped and redirected, often into radically different political trajectories.

As Alan Finlayson has argued, contemporary digital media is changing the ways that societal political education happens and how political concepts are understood. Again, we know this quite well at this point. It is YouTube and Reddit and TikTok and Facebook and Twitter where we increasingly come to see and do politics.

And so when thinking about these mirroring processes, I've also taken inspiration from in what Naomi Klein also calls a mirror world. And I argue that feminists and conservative or reactionary women are engaged in precisely such a mirror world that Klein is talking about. Klein argues that in the contemporary political moment driven by digital networks of misinformation and conspiracy theories,

There is a mirroring effect between those on the political left and right, where feelings of fear, rage, and abandonment are shared, even if the origins and the realities of that fear and abandonment are different. We see this explicitly

in the particular violent meme that emerged on the night of the 2024 U.S. presidential election when white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes posted on Twitter, "Your body, my choice forever." A sinister play on the feminist slogan, "My body, my choice." This violent mirroring of a feminist slogan

about bodily autonomy had in a day or so been viewed more than 90 million times and been reposted more than 35,000 times.

Contemporary mirror worlds also resemble what I called in 2018 the funhouse mirror of popular feminism and popular misogyny, where misogynists take up some of the themes of feminism, confidence, self-esteem, empowerment, and turn them on their heads to create men as the victims of women, and feminists the victims of feminism, or feminists in particular, as if reflected in the distortion of a funhouse mirror.

and my colleague here at the LSE, Lily Huliarki, has brilliantly analyzed this victimhood flip in her recent book, Wronged. These are the kinds of mirror worlds that my current work focuses on, where feminist and conservative constructions of femininity, in effect, engage in common themes but have very different solutions or reactions.

Kay, in an article on what she calls "reactionary feminists," continues these themes of mirroring and rage in a generative direction, making a compelling case for the ways in which reactionary feminists are those who position themselves

against other versions of feminisms, especially in terms of the ineluctability of gender differences or the rejection of neoliberal feminism and its lean-in presuppositions or focus on motherhood and marriage. We see this in popular media, as in the newly launched EV Magazine, the right-wing women's magazine that markets itself as the unbiased truth for women.

Sorry, I just can't help it. I mean media, we're media scholars. It's the unbiased truth for women. The aesthetic and style of Evie mirrors other women's magazines like Cosmo and Vogue. It offers some of the same types of articles on fashion and makeup, the importance of being sexy, the art of feminine fitness and so on. But it also offers articles and interviews that are anti-choice.

about rigid heteronormative motherhood and about the evils of feminism. It positions itself as the corrective to the damaging lies that are spewed by traditional women's media and by feminism in particular. So you can see this is their kind of mission statement on Evie's website where they say, "We believe the only way forward

is to acknowledge and celebrate those differences, those biological differences between men and women by embracing our nature despite the world telling us we should hate the realities of our biologies and what we are. So again, positioning feminism as something, as an avatar that is about spewing hate.

We also see these mirroring themes in recent U.S. policy. Apologies for having U.S. policy examples here. They just come so fast and furious every single day that it makes it very difficult to see outside of those. And so while there are many different examples around the world, the focus of this kind of idea of motherhood and bioessentialism is really on very recent U.S. policy.

There have been hundreds of executive orders that have been issued by the Trump administration in the first hundred days of his second term, including those that specifically focus on family and reproduction.

In one such order that was intended to expand access to in vitro fertilization, it reads, "My administration recognizes the importance of family formation, and as a nation, our public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children." Indeed, Trump has taken up

The issue of IVF with a cringe-worthy gusto, naming himself at a recent event that ostensibly celebrated Women's History Month in the US as the "fertilization president." Sorry. Lest women worry about, I don't know, the removal of the rights of bodily autonomy, Trump went on in this speech to reassure us.

He said, "We're going to have tremendous goodies in the bag for women. The women between the fertilization and all the other things that we're talking about, it's going to be great."

This is an insidious mirror world. Treatments like IVF have been an important element of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights for women. In this mirror world, these rights are systematically taken away and replaced with a goody bag for women, which is simply promised in a very vague sense to be great.

Indeed, the pronatalism of the US Federal Administration, including Trump's unelected right-hand man, Elon Musk, is part of this mirror world.

Recently, the White House has discussed a variety of ideas that are intended to allow and in some cases encourage parents to spend more time at home with their children, including giving more money to families for each child they have in a kind of form of an expanded tax credit for each child and a family. Feminists and other advocates for women have long, long been agitating for an expanded tax credit for children.

However, Trump's expanded tax credit would take the money away from federal tax credits for daycare and childcare, thus implying that families would receive a tax benefit only if one parent stayed at home with the children. And it doesn't take much to guess which parent that would be.

Another idea floated by the administration a couple weeks ago is a $5,000 cash baby bonus to every American mother right after delivery. Surely a $5,000 baby bonus is the same as having a second income for a family, but this is the kind of, you know, this idea that it is about having mothers stay, women stay at home with their children. Another proposal

would reserve 30% of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious government-backed international fellowship. It would preserve 30% of those fellowships for applicants who are married and have children.

In case anyone needs actual facts to provide context for these proposals, here's just a few. The majority of mothers in the United States work outside of the home in order to survive economically. The cost of childcare averages about $11,000 per child per year and is double that in most major cities in the United States. So we're talking $22,000 per child

per year in the US. Again, many feminists have been agitating for years to reward reproductive labor as labor. Think of this wages for housework movement in the 1970s. But in this mirror world, rewarding reproductive labor is a move that rewards particular women and at the expense of other policies like decent labor.

in humane maternity leave or childcare. And this mirroring manifests in many spaces, including in how bodies are regulated and governed, especially women's bodies. Max Reed has described this shift in the federal administration as one of a sort of "public policy breeding fetish." So,

For the kind of final part of my talk, I'm going with this public policy breeding fetish as context. I want to delve more deeply into a very specific mirror world, the worlds of trad wives and feminists. Trad wives from the portmanteau traditional wife is an increasingly visible genre of lifestyle influencers on social media.

There are also outside of social media, the ones that it's a capacious category. There are some trad wives that are homesteaders, that are some cat trad wives who are trying to escape modernity. In this talk, I'm focusing on kind of politically conservative Western trad wives on social media. The women who identify within this genre of trad wives send a deceptively simple message, happiness for women,

is to be found in caring for and submitting to one's husband, having and raising children, and keeping a tidy and comfortable home.

The media representation of Tradwives is not new, of course, though it has reached a specific form of political visibility in the current digital mediascape, where Tradwife influencers have followers in the hundreds of thousands, offering their ideas and suggestions about how to "get back" to traditional gender roles and family dynamics.

Along with my PhD student, Sarah Rennes, we have curated and analyzed a list of 50 Tradwife accounts across Instagram and TikTok that have directly embraced this title of Tradwife and have created posts that explicitly promote a lifestyle of traditional gender roles to their followers.

The typical trad wife in the mid-21st century explicitly longs for a mythic past where apparently men were men, women were women,

and together they existed in dyads of harmony and bliss. This rose-colored past is often explicitly juxtaposed with an uncertain present, where gender identities are often blurred, where you don't know what pronoun to use, where economic success seems far out of reach for most people, and feminism continues to insist that women should be treated equally as men.

Tradwives do not merely adopt this lifestyle in everyday practice, however, but broadcast this choice on social media, posting videos of themselves keeping a pristine home, cooking for a family, caring for children and a husband, although the husbands are very rarely seen in their posts, if you've seen any of them, and often...

receiving financial benefits from sponsors, affiliate marketing, or selling their own products. Online tradwives position themselves as aspirational for their followers, yet they are not only propagating through this life through social media, but are also profiting, sometimes quite significantly, from their videos.

So most of the recent popular press about trad wives, and there have been many articles, highlight the aesthetics of the women that they are profiling, their commitment to motherhood and marriage, their seeming self-sacrifice, and their hostility to feminism. These media stories often revolve around a few highly visible women

Women who have followers in the millions often inherited wealth and a perfected profile on social media. Does anyone recognize any of these tradwives up here? Okay, so we've got Hannah Nealman from Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith. These media stories, again, they often revolve around these few highly visible women who have followers in the millions.

Right? And certainly these highly visible tradwives have captured public attention, but we tried in this work to kind of broaden the discussion to have a sort of bring in a larger range of influencers, of kind of everyday influencers.

This networked collective of tradwife influencers, we argue, fit within what Lauren Berlant called "intimate publics." Women's culture, they convincingly point out, is often characterized by a discourse of disappointment in societal and cultural expectations of women, leading to their concept of cruel optimism, where women invest in conditions that are designed, literally designed, to marginalize them.

The intimate public of Tradwives revolves around heteronormativity and domestic bliss, but also again emphasizes that this domestic bliss is the response to the cruel optimism of living in a capitalist world that pays lip service to gender equality.

In other words, trad wives unify around yet another, again, another very specific theme, their hostility towards feminism, often to the point where they blame feminists explicitly rather than the patriarchy for numerous breakdowns in society. And so...

This is just one of the Tradwife accounts that we looked at where it says, you know, it blames kind of feminism and feminist theory, that it's a philosophy of bitterness, that all feminists at some point in their lives chose to nurse their grievances and nurture their hearts until they grew into demonic rage machines that could no longer be reasoned with.

I kind of think that I'm going to use that as my signature in my email from now on. Like Sarah Benet Weiser, demonic rage machine that cannot be reasoned with.

So this is the kind of tone of these accounts. So in this work, we look at different breakdowns in society, including the myth of the girl boss or hustle culture, including the lack of care networks and social service networks. Today, in keeping with some of the other examples, I'm going to talk about the breakdown in terms of the devaluing of reproductive labor.

One of the most prominent themes of tradwife accounts is this devaluation of reproductive labor. Again, tradwives rage again and again against the tendency to devalue and dismiss reproductive labor. This critique has long been a central tenet of feminist thought. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, the Wages for Housework movement addressed this very concern through powerful transnational organizing in the 1970s.

Feminist theories of social reproduction emphasize this point, arguing that the gendered relationships that are involved in maintaining people through childcare, domestic work, and other forms of invisible labor are key to the continuation of capitalism.

Yet this labor, as many of us know, is not valued within capitalism. The devaluation of gendered labor instead solidifies gendered divisions of labor and intensifies patriarchal norms. Capitalism has worked historically to retrench male dominance, not subvert it. Trad wives, however,

selectively draw out some contorted components of this feminist lineage while spotlighting the systematic devaluation of women's work in the home. However, they take a sharp detour from the radical roots of this thinking and instead lean into reductive bioessentialism that makes motherhood a predestined calling for women's true feminine nature.

In other words, while historically feminists have sought to denaturalize invisible labor and position it as explicitly political, tradwives seek to renaturalize this gendered labor and position it as a sacred duty. And so you can see these are just a couple of screenshots from some of the tradwives accounts that are about kind of talking about motherhood as a sacred duty.

Silvia Federici in 1975 famously claimed, "They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work." Twisting this notion, tradwives insist it is both. For tradwives, the degradation of reproductive labor is only solved by elevating motherhood as the only noble vocation for women. House-homemaking is as much a job as any paid position.

As evidenced by the Wages for Housework movement, the radical potential of such a claim should not be dismissed. However, this statement, taken from Tradwife's Instagram post, does not stop there and continues by saying, quote, I have a job given to me by the Lord and a duty to my people.

By pairing together these statements, devalued domestic labor does not warrant compensation or a rethinking of systemic support, but instead requires humble submission to this holy calling.

Indeed, distorted echoes of feminist notions of reproductive labor are strangely present across Tradwife content. Many statements from Tradwives have a level of concordance with the notion that was distilled by a highly circulated poster from the CRED Women's Workshop in 1975. "Capitalism also depends on domestic labor," that poster said.

Repeatedly, tradwives call attention to how their unwaged labor forms the scaffolding for society. And here are just a couple of different, again, pull quotes from tradwives' account. "Being a housewife is honorable and worthy of respect, vital to the functioning of society. Stay-at-home moms know that they will be looked down upon. We also know that what we do isn't making money.

but we know that some of the most valuable, impactful work in this world isn't paid. These are really, really important statements, right? And these arguments do demand respect for reproductive labor.

But they also accept the idea that this is a woman's natural and necessary role. In an attempt to rescue domestic labor from disregard, tradwives overcorrect and construct it as a feminine destiny. Feminists seek to make invisible labor visible and attach a wage to domestic work.

And yet, in a strange twist, Tradwives' insistence on filming, uploading, and monetizing their content on social media does deliver some semblance of visibility and monetization, albeit in vastly varying degrees and with a lot of precarity. But the similarities end there.

Where feminists, again, seek or wish to denaturalize the idea that women are destined to perform reproductive labor, trad wives seek to not only renaturalize it, but supernaturalize it. Reproductive labor is a God-given duty and thus must be embraced as such.

Such a framing then positions any resistance to this role as a deeply selfish and misguided desire. In contrast to a feminist framing of this issue as a political struggle, tradwives advocate acceptance. As a smiling woman in front of a laundry machine states, quote, "No matter how much society tries to convince me to hold on to my conditioned anger, I will not fall for it."

Because I know all good things take mercy and forgiveness and what blessings my role holds.

Resistance to reproductive labor or to the invisibility of reproductive labor, whether that be in the form of agitating for reproductive rights and insistence on an equal division of domestic labor or equality in the workplace, is thus construed as a path of conditioned anger and one that shirks mercy and forgiveness and blessings.

In this mirror world, feminist calls to negotiate the value of child rearing and domestic labor are turned into betrayal. Quote, "Modern day feminists are not fighting for equality. They're fighting against women."

They're fighting to strip us from traditional feminine desires and beauty, states a text overlay on a video of a woman dancing in front of a clothesline. They are fighting to make childbearing insignificant and boring when reality it is the most important job in the world. Here doubling down on the conditions of submissive womanhood is presented as the only way to elevate women from a degraded status.

Continuing the association of feminism with capitalist logics, tradwives also blame feminism as the reason that motherhood is degraded. In another post, they say, it's obvious that the women who founded the feminist movement did not value motherhood, nor see it as a legitimate contribution to society, but neither does feminism today.

She continues, "This wasn't just a past sentiment. The roots were rotten and so was the fruit." So a false binary becomes pervasive and from this vantage point, embracing traditional gender roles is the only space where reproductive labor enjoys the honored status it deserves.

In the mirror world of tradwives, feminism is construed as the force that pushes domestic labor into a sphere of unimportance and invisibility. It is constructed as an avatar that is the target of their rage. Focusing on making invisible labor visible, tradwives take a potentially liberatory premise and twist it into a regressive conclusion.

For this group, it's not the case that domestic care work should be valued more by society as work, but only as a calling. This focus on individualizing and naturalizing invisible labor is precisely the opposite of feminist calls for a theory of social reproduction and a recognition of a crisis of care.

So this rageful reaction of the far right to feminism manifests in tradwives who are one of the conduits for generating this kind of mirror world that I'm looking at where female rage is transformed into idealized femininity and feminism again becomes a lie, a con, an avatar. So to wrap up

Again, as I wrote recently with Jilly Kay, feminist ideas and reactionary politics are being mixed and matched in the current digital moment. They're scrambled and recomposed in a hall of mirrors, leading to anti-feminism and nihilistic anti-politics.

In that piece, we insisted on rejecting anti-politics as a way to engage in those struggles. Tradwives who insist that feminism is a lie and a con, these practices center despair and counter hope. Media scholar Wendy Chun has recently written about the contemporary political and technological landscape, which she sees as characterized by what she calls, quote, the sadistic

mirroring a progressive politics. This is a mirroring that is fundamentally about despair and cruelty. Chan argues that the current climate represents what she deems a shift from masochism to sadism, arguing that this sadistic culture is, quote, "focused on demonstration, on showing how reasoning itself is a form of violence, on negation as the absolute idea of reason, on always being right."

So the question I'm asking when I look at gender digital culture, when I look at these things, when I look at the kind of heightened visibility of different things like EV Magazine or Tradwives and so on, is what's at stake in thinking of the current moment as one of "sadistic mirroring of progressive politics"?

A few months ago, I was on a panel at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies with some amazing colleagues who are in this room, Rachel O'Neill, Simi Dorsakan. Our panel was titled, "What is Feminism Anymore?" In this talk, I've admittedly been a bit loose with the term "feminism." It's clearly a capacious category and does not mean one thing at one historical moment.

But even in its narrower identifications, feminism is riven with ambivalence. That's what we discussed on that panel. The current multiple manifestations of feminism, particularly but not exclusively in the media, are rife with contradictions, challenges, and a deep ambivalence.

As Claire Hemmings has argued, feminist political ambivalence structures feminist practice and contains both the conditions of possibility and the conditions for limiting those very practices. So in that same panel, the feminist media scholar Helen Wood asked a question that has lived in my head in an endless loop ever since.

"What is," she asked, "what is the future that is envisioned by reactionary feminists, by this kind of sadistic mirroring and cruelty of contemporary politics? And what is the future that is envisioned by those of us who reject this kind of rage?" Anne Helen Peterson in a recent post made a very good point saying, quote, "It's so much easier to market rage than care." I've written a fair bit about marketing and branding.

And I think a lot about why it's easy to market rage. Shame and humiliation and cruelty are easy weapons to wield. Care and compassion are much harder and much trickier. So for me to answer Helen, part of that future involves care and compassion. It's not about calling people idiots. It's not mean-spirited. It's not cruel or sadistic.

It's more about what Miriam Kaba calls "active hope." She says that in order to practice active hope, we need not to believe that everything is going to work out in the end. We need only to decide who we are choosing to be and how we are choosing to function in relation to social change and the kind of social change that we want to be a part of.

To make feminism into an avatar that is the target of rage is about marketing rage. It is about rejecting active hope. Feminism is a politics. For me, feminism is a politics and a praxis. We don't need to continue to market rage. We don't need to give in to cruelty and sadism. And I think that actually that's why I don't want to write about Blake Lively. Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Benewiser, for that wonderful talk. I really appreciate the idea of active hope and certainly understand and empathise with your idea, your desire not to write about like lively. I now invite Professor McRobbie to offer a response, which I'm sure will set us up wonderfully for the discussion that will follow. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. Thank you so much, Sarah, for both this lovely invitation and also for the fantastic invitation

wonderful lecture that covers so much ground that immediately made me think I will negate and put aside the notes that I had prepared and just kind of respond on the spot. Actually, I think probably what I'll do is a combination of both.

I hope Sarah will also forgive me for swinging a little in the comments that I've already written here between some aspects of my own work and Sarah's

range of books and articles for the reason that we have been in dialogue for so many years and it's been very productive exchange and so I thought that I would reread Empowered from 2018 and then a series of the articles that are more recently including the co-author with Gillie Kane.

So that's what I've done. But perhaps before I actually move on to that, I think that probably what we all here have taken from your lecture is the need for a feminist theory, a feminist politics of rage, which is clearly what you have been developing over the last few years. And as you were talking, I was thinking about

Is there a legacy of theories in feminist thought on rage? Are there other thinkers who have dealt with rage? Did Simone de Beauvoir write about rage? I don't seem to remember a chapter on rage. I think that when we think about rage, we think about writers like Fanon,

obviously. I remember myself making use of Homi Bhabha's idea of illegible rage, which also Judith Butler then used. But the history and the tradition of feminism is perhaps has been primarily directed towards a kind of ethics of nonviolence in the Butlerian sense. And also perhaps

perhaps an emphasis on the kind of psychoanalysis of anger and how can anger, how is it contained, how is it controlled, how is it politically directed? And as you were talking I was thinking well we are all raging all the time right now, it's true, but I was trying to think about when was I left

when was a memorable moment of being absolutely raging myself. I think it was the night of Grenfell Tower. I just remember feeling this incredible kind of rage that something like this accident had happened. So, okay, so I would say what we maybe need is to continue and develop a politics of rage

And in relation to your last comments about mirroring and doubling, that also reminded me a little bit of the idea of feminism haunting the edges of political and cultural discourse.

and both Derrida and Butler invoked this idea of, and I used it in my earlier work, of that feminism haunts the edges of the discourse. So as it is being invoked by all of these writers,

from the Evie and from the Tradwife. They are invoking it in order to repudiate it, and in repudiating it, they're bringing it back to life, showing how much it is a constant presence in everyday life. So this kind of spiral of rage

indicates perhaps the proximity you can see also in the speeches of many of the right-wing politicians you can see in donald trump's speech you can see in jd vance you can see it particularly in stephen miller um

that in being invoked, it's also there. So it's a formidable opponent. It is a real challenge to what the far-right project is. It's perhaps the challenge. And also, this is, I think, something new. The invoking of feminism has not been part of far-right discourse until very recently. So, okay, well, that's almost my...

John, let me just skim through, if it's useful, a few more of the comments. I'll list them out from what I wrote. You write a lot about popular feminism, and I think one of the further tasks

that we have to engage with is what is the difference between academic feminism of the world that we inhabit and the books we read and the people we engage with and this thing called popular feminism. And back in 2018, you argue that popular feminism prompted a counter-reaction of vitriolic misogyny. Frightening and dangerous, the threat of violence lurks.

Do we need then a new sociology of both popular feminism and popular misogyny that involves, and I know many of you are doing this work, ethnographic studies with young men and women alongside media analysis? Is that the kind of project program that we need to be looking at? You've already begun work in this

project and just as a moment of self-reflexivity I question actually my own surprise indeed astonishment maybe it's because I am the product of the kind of post-war peacenik generation but I question my own surprise indeed astonishment at the phenomenon of popular misogyny it sort of hit me

with this astonishment and when I wrote back in 2008 the aftermath of feminism I talked about backlash and the complexification of backlash actually that was a very sort of gentle managerialist paternalistic backlash you know it was very much echoing from new labor oh

Feminism had its day, my dears, and now you don't need it anymore. So it was kind of kind and gentle. And actually where I clearly got it wrong was that Susan Faludi's backlash still actually had a sizable presence, both in terms of the contemporary voices from the evangelical right and from the Christian right,

and alongside that that's been compounded by the new social media misogyny so in a moment of self-reflexivity i think that you know that i did not pay attention to the long legacy of hatred and anti-feminism which has kind of lurked beneath the surface um so that is um one uh

thing that I'm aware of. I also

wondered, the second point that I thought in relation to your Empowered book on popular feminism was if popular feminism as it's taken up and has now triggered this reaction, the popular feminism of the sort that you describe that Emma Watson and that Elle magazine endorsed, another kind of commercial feminism,

Is it worth now looking back at what you also see as kind of corporate feminism, that sort of superficial, feminist-friendly, marketing-led feminism, and how could we

assess the longevity of that? When we look at it now, is that something that is likely to disappear in the current climate of anti-DEI? Was it very superficial?

Actually, even though we might see it as being very superficial, that doesn't make it uninteresting. And I think that's where we all agree that Elle magazine being a champion of feminists and other magazines that I remember reading at the time saying, "Get out there, young women. Go on a women's march," was really a sizable change for contemporary popular culture. So I think it's worth kind of thinking about what was going on there.

and who were the agents that were introducing these kind of feminist ideas and was that kind of popular feminism the trigger for the popular misogyny that we're or was it both popular feminism and academic feminism um okay i'm i'm going to stop there and just like with and skim through a few questions that i've got for you um

questions to Sarah. You have done amazing work on incels, on groups that I myself have not looked out or looked at the return of kings and the various kind of dark web masculinity.

So one question is how can the social institutions counter these online and offline actual forms of gender violence, especially in times of free speech and the reactions against being cancelled? Is there a bridge between our academic feminism and those professionals out there who are challenging in a very vocal way?

these forms of hate speech. I'm thinking about Laura Bates, obviously, but also the barrister Charlotte Proudman. So that's one question. I've already asked you about rage, and I think my final comment really is about the trad wife.

Let me kind of offer a little bit of a provocation on the trad wife. Does monetisation undercut the image of the stay-at-home mom inactive in the labour market? Is there a sense in which trad wife imagery and lifestyle, especially in the UK, just does not ring true? It's kind of

blatantly unviable for women to stay at home and be dependent. Looking at the Tradwife through the lens of race and class marks it out as a display of white power, also an aggressive gesture to working-class women, women of colour, who have always worked

Tying this figure to the hard right would then make sense as a contemporary version of fascistic homesteading mythology, as you implicitly point to.

the glorification of the maternal nationalism, which also we see to an extent being taken up by the AFD in Germany. So is the Tried Wife actually an open signifier stretching from pragmatic attention to domestic labour and childcare through to entertainment fantasies of family happiness?

to lucrative monetizing to neo-fascist white supremacy. And I'll stop there. - Would you like to come back first before we go to the audience for a few points? - Sure. - I think you should. - Okay, thank you Angela. As per usual, first of all, I also have, you know,

I have found our years-long dialogue about these issues incredibly generative for my own thinking and my own inhabiting political position as a feminist through, you know,

And having you as this crucial interlocutor, I was one of the first talks I ever gave in the UK. I was invited by Angela to Goldsmiths years ago. So I really appreciate that history and that trajectory.

back then and now and in between, the questions never get easier from Professor Angela McRobbie. They're all very, very good and important questions. So I'll just kind of give a couple of thoughts on some of them. I think that one of the things that I have been, that I kind of applied here but I haven't really

I didn't delve into so much in this talk was this idea about corporate feminism. So, you know, I think the current

political moment of gender construction and gender dynamics and gender practice is not the kind of neoliberal presupposition of lean in and corporate feminism and girl bossing. In fact, tradwives really, really reject the myth of the girl boss and they reject a lot of capitalist hustle. So it's a very different kind of political economic culture, I think, that some of these far right

expressions are embracing and perpetuating. It's not, and the homesteading that you talked about in the last question is also part of this. I mean, the trad wives, just like feminism, is a very capacious category, like I said at the beginning of the talk. These accounts that we looked at were really about kind of monetizing and having brand affiliates and really had a

pretty simple message that you submit to your husband and you build a home for your children. A lot of it is about keeping a tidy home. A lot of it is about

making food from scratch. A lot of it is about questioning and challenging food supply and the ways in which capitalist food supply has kind of, you know, distorted and corrupted things like food supply. So there's a kind of anti-capitalist or anti-capitalist practice bent to a lot of

the trad wives that are presenting. So it makes it a very, it makes it so it is not at all easy to say this is about neoliberal capitalism. I actually don't think it is. I think it's about something different and I think that as we're witnessing in global politics and a global trade war, that neoliberalism is morphing into something different anyway, even while it's residual, even while it continues to be a structuring force. So does

Does the, you know, I'm answering the, just addressing the last question first. Does the monetization counteract the homemaking, this sort of, you know, aggressive gesture that is about working class women and women of color who have always worked? I mean, the trad wives we looked at, they are not

all white, they are predominantly white. The ones that are circulated in popular media have inherited wealth. They, you know, Ballerina Farm, Hannah Nealman, if you don't know, her husband is the heir to the JetBlue fortune. And so there's, and you know, there's just, there's wealth there, inherited wealth, and there's aspirational labor in the way that Brooke Duffy has talked about it in terms of these kind of outgrowths of the,

of the Tradwife accounts. Not all of them lead to fascistic aesthetics. Lots of them do. And so I think that that's another thing people who have been examining

on the sort of darker corners of the web have seen that this is something that this kind of homesteading, this kind of rejection of a certain capitalist politics of capitalist feminism is about a sort of fascistic, not just aesthetic, but politics. So that is definitely part of it. Would you be okay, sir, if we just move to get a few questions from the audience so we can try and mix in some of these responses? Of course, because I don't know how to answer the

anyway, so yes, please ask me something. Okay, I'd like to now open the discussion to our audience. We've got about 20 minutes for this just about. For those in the room, please raise your hand and do wait until the microphone comes to you when called upon as the acoustics in this room really do require it. Those online should be able to enter their questions into the chat. Luama is fielding those and will have an opportunity to hear from her directly if and when she gets some questions there. Okay, so take person in the blue here.

person in the red and then we'll go to the person in the brown, please.

Thank you for the really interesting discussion. I was wondering about the question of whether we need the importance of a politics of rage and whether it's also important to consider the politics of happiness. And I think it's definitely important that we redirect the kind of far-right rage against progressive values and equality. But I wonder if we also need to redirect the far-right rage

a vision of happiness away from the kind of nostalgia associated with the Tradwife and towards a alternative utopian vision of happiness which could yeah help in that redirection of the politics of happiness. Do you want me to take? Could we take a few together if that's okay? Yourself there please in the red.

Thanks a lot for the talk. This is a question for Professor Bannet-Weiser on the role of religion that it plays in this feminism or anti-feminism also, especially if we've seen the new generation is adopting religion a lot more and in the US the kind of the young men who are turning to the right are also often turning to traditional religious values. Thank you. Wonderfully brief. Excellent. Thank you. Shall we take a question? The person in the brown here as well. We'll just take a few together.

This is a little bit similar to that first question. I'm wondering how the figure of the angry feminist or the feminist killjoy has evolved through this change in this current affective economies of rage, what this means for a future feminist politics of rage, and then similarly, to what extent rage is productive given the defeatist and defensive nature of reactionary feminism?

Okay. No short order. No short order. So I'll combine these questions about the politics of happiness. I think that, you know, I've really been thinking a lot about

about this idea of marketing rage and how easy it is to market rage and how that's not actually getting us anywhere in terms of you know a way forward or a way to even think more generatively about what to do about cultural politics at the moment, how to resist them, how to take into account

these varying ideas and ideologies without being dismissive, without being moralizing, without being condescending about this. And so I've been thinking a lot about that kind of affective process. I'm not sure

if happiness is exactly where I would go with it and that's in part because how you reference this Ahmed's work on the promise of happiness where she talks about the kind of stickiness of happiness scripts right here you can see the happiness scripts if you if you choose to not have a husband and not have children in the home you are refusing the script to happiness you deserve to be miserable

Right? You deserve, you are making a selfish move. You are, and so there's this kind of, you know, that actually gets to the kind of religion question too. There's a sort of retribution, you know, and combined with a redemption for choosing the right script of happiness. So I would say that, that...

And I think your gesture towards this, it's not about embracing a nostalgic view of happiness. That's why I like this idea of a sort of strategic imperative of hope or a strategic imperative for thinking differently about the current moment that isn't about happiness or necessarily the kind of rage that is being unleashed.

marketed, but rather about what are the different kinds of affects that are in this affective economy and how can we redirect them in a way. If Tried Wives could redirect the rage of feminists into this very successful narrative that we're miserable, what am I, a demonic machine of rage that cannot be reasoned with?

We can redirect too. It turns out that, you know, we made media, we can unmake it, we can make it in different ways, we are producers in that way. And so I think that choosing something that is more about a utopia, in your words, or less about this sort of promise of happiness or a happiness script and into something that is about productive ambivalence

is a way that I think we could think more generatively about politics. I don't think, I mean I think that one of the things that is happening is this, like I said in the talk, this false binary is being created. What if we resist the binary? What if we embrace ambivalence and messiness rather than closure and neatness and scripts that tell us exactly how we can be happy? And so that's kind of how I would answer those two questions, I think. The question about religion,

So is the question like what is the role of religion? Yeah, I mean religion I think is playing a very interesting role in contemporary cultural politics that is seen to be divided along gendered lines, right? Where you see more men who are kind of drifting towards an evangelical or a more religious foundation and more women kind of moving away from that.

And so here, I think that they're trying to, what Trout-O-Wives are trying to do is redirect religion so that motherhood in particular is about God's calling and is a blessing. And it's like one of those things that makes it very difficult in some ways to critique because

I'm a mother, you know, my kids are great, I like them, you know, I mean, you know, I like being a mother. And so if you think that if you critique any of this and say, but that's not my religious calling to be a mother, that somehow you're embracing a sort of selfish and miserable, you know, orientation towards motherhood and that's the kind of form of religion, which is certainly not all religions, but that is the form of religion that I think is present here.

So we take a few more questions and then we might allow both of our speakers to come back and then we'll go to online. So I'm just, I can see several hands. Could we have this person in the white here to begin with and this person in the blue at the back? Thank you. I was just going to ask on a sort of earlier point mentioned earlier,

as an educator, when you talk about active hope and sort of championing that in a space that is schooled where masculinity often manifests as anti-feminist, how do you champion that active hope, I guess? - Great question. Taking a couple, a couple together, don't mind. - Hello, my question was wondering if you can speak a little bit to where wellness and wellness influencers intersect with this

in particular thinking about the growing sentiment amongst wellness influencers to be anti-birth control and pro-family planning and natural cycles and things like that that are typically come from a trad wife or Christian perspective and where that kind of sits in these conversations. We'll take one more, this person in the blue.

First of all, thank you for this amazing space and conversation. I'm from Latin America, and when you were talking about anger and rage in general, I think that there are some perspectives that there may not be taken into account, especially in the context of the global north. Right now in Latin America, you might know this, things are pretty heavy.

in terms of the anti-right movements. When we say anti-right, it's like human rights, and especially like women, LGBTQ+ rights. And there's like this new approach towards anger that is anger is something that dignifies us, that gives us dignity. So I was just wondering, is it possible for us as scholars to change also the narratives we have of anger?

maybe framing as something positive as we are allowed to be anger and it's good to be angry sometimes. Thank you. Would you like to lead us off on that to begin with and come back? Yes, I was thinking that if anger can be mobilized as you say

then it clearly indeed has had an incredible momentum for new forms of feminism. That's absolutely correct.

But there is also the idea of the duration of anger and the exhaustion of anger. And I think we have to see it in a narrative. What are the narratives of anger and how can they be then mobilized and turned into something that is sustainable really? And I think you're absolutely right.

Argentinian feminists that we can learn a lot from in that respect. So yeah, yeah, thank you.

Yeah, I'll just add a couple of thoughts to that. I mean, I think that one of the things about Latin American feminist, feminism movements that I've been looking at in recent years, Cesar knows about this, Las Tesis and Neo-Nomenos and the different ways in which there are like incredible transnational organizing in Latin America that is absolutely

exhilarating, right? And it also is impactful like in Argentina and in different ways. And it's also multimodal. And so I think that we need to think about that in terms of what kind, how we can mobilize rage, you know,

I have a student who is doing, a PhD student who's working on Latin American feminism in anthems and singing and also in weaving and colors and aesthetics and performances like Lestasi's. And so there's ways in which I think we can, if we just expand our understanding of what resistance looks like, if we think about anger as being something that dignifies rather than

as something that is to hide away, to be contained.

I think it means that we have to embrace messiness. Like there's like a long history of feminists being angry. We know this, right? And so that's media representations and stereotypes and everything else. And so I think that rather than try to like fix that, let's have a different sort of embrace of anger as something that is dignified and also messy. So hopefully that gets to that. Wellness influencers,

I have many thoughts and we don't have that much time but I think that

Wellness influencers are also a sort of broad category. They're not just one kind of category. In the United States right now where there is a kind of like embrace, a national and federal embrace that is resulting in policy and will result in people dying, many, many people because of the different ways in which things like certain sorts of wellness

including those with wellness influencers have been adopted. I feel like, you know, I can't just make a judgment about wellness influencers, but I can say that a lot of the trad wives also, you know, will

they will promote and be sponsored by different wellness like anti birth control period trackers how to you know how to uh... uh... become a pro natal i will also say that that's so much of the wellness influencers that that that promote things that are about women's bodies are also about surveillance uh... and about regulating a disciplining women's bodies uh... and we see that you know different uh... uh...

different facts about this or different events where you see women have been, you know, kind of followed to an abortion clinic because they had a period tracker or that kind of thing. So that was more of a rant than an answer against wellness influencers. I'm happy to talk to you later about maybe there's some that are I'm sure fine.

It's a great question about active hope and how to champion that in terms of masculinity and anti-feminisms in education.

Again, what I'm trying to think about as in my work or just think about as a politics for the future, as a politics, a sort of utopian politics, is to stop marketing and branding rage and really kind of

figure out a new pedagogical imperative that isn't about rage, but also takes into consideration things like alienation and loneliness and abandonment, but talks about active hope as something that is not about anti-masculinity or anti-feminism.

feminist, but rather is about the way that we should live together as humans. I mean, I know that sounds very utopic, but it's a pretty dystopic world right now. And I'm thinking, why the hell not? Let's go for the utopia and think about different ways. I think that channeling young people's use of media is

is a really important way to think about this. This is not, and I'm feeling my colleague Sonia Livingston right here, this is not about taking smartphones away from anybody or engaging in a moral panic about what they do. It's about a different kind of educational

strategy and pedagogical strategy about what are the promises and what are the ways in which social media and the way that we are media makers, you all are media makers all the time, how does that result in something that could be productive and generative rather than hate-filled and violent? I would like to give an opportunity for our online audience to come in. Luan, do you have any questions that you would like to bring to us?

Yes, so just one question from Alan Greek in Brooklyn. Can you say more about MAGA male rage and tradwives in relation to white supremacy and whiteness as a repression, redirection of black rage in order to uphold a naturalized racial gender order? Luan, can I say something more about how white rage, how this kind of rage of tradwives in the far right is about whiteness and how it's juxtaposed against what could be called

Black rage, that was the question. Yeah, great question. I mean, I think that, again, the majority, the vast majority of trad wives accounts that I've examined have been white women. The sort of pronatalism that has become part of wellness influencers and this idea of

that we all need to have more babies because the population growth is decreasing, or there is no, you know, the population growth, I guess, is decreasing. That is really, there is, you know, if you look into it just barely under the surface, that is not about having more babies, that is about having more white babies. That is about, you know, replenishing a white population. That is, you know, part of white supremacy and different kind of corners of white supremacy

not just online but in policy and kind of the realities of material life.

Black rage, at least in terms of feminist, black feminism, has often been seen as, you know, again, a criticism but also a demonization of black feminists as just being angry, as being out of control. This in the United States is related to all sorts of kind of historical formations including the transatlantic slave trade where it is that

black women were always angry, superhuman strength, you know, as a way to justify owning other human beings as property. And so I think that that has a long history and the kind of rage that is happening, this sort of sublimated or repressed rage that is happening

with the Tradwives, I think is also lashing out at that history. And so doing is sort of reifying. And this gets to your first question or one of your questions about race and class and rage and how it kind of has different manifestations depending on both the kind of context, the media context, but also how it is being received.

Yeah, just to follow up, I mean personally I find the Tradwife iconography as wholly and unambiguously racist. I think it's a strategy of racism

And I think it's the equivalent of the Karen kind of figurations, but remoulded into a middle class, pleasant, nice kind of sanitized environment. So it hasn't got that kind of working class aggression. But I find it absolutely holy and unambivalently a provocation, an act of aggression. And, you know, it...

blondness, not just, you know, the blondness and this kind of dress and style is a powerful vehicle of the new right. Yeah, I think just to add to that, one of the mirror worlds that I'm looking at is also, is this kind of a feminine politics of aesthetics, of bodily aesthetics, and looking at what is being called Mar-a-Lago face

which if you look at, and I have slides that have like the sort of pictures of the different women in the federal administration in the United States right now that all look

really really similar there's a whole movement in d_c_ right in washington d_c_ right now called it's maha but it's not make america healthy again it's make america hot again and they have meetups where they all that are and they're all white and they all have a kind of

aesthetic and similarity and also retro. They wear pearls and they have a particular hairstyle and they wear particular kinds of dresses. And so I think that that also gets to a sort of aesthetics of, you know, if you want to think about how, Angela, what you talked about in terms of sort of

and aesthetics of fascism, you know, that that also was something that we can see happening on a very more superficial level and just make America hot again. But it has, I think, material effects that are also about whiteness and rage. We do now actually need to bring the discussion to a close. This has been a fantastic discussion. Thanks again to both of our speakers this evening. Thank you.

As I mentioned briefly at the beginning, this is the last public lecture in our department's program for the year, but we are currently in the process of organizing another fantastic several sessions for next academic year, so do keep an eye out for that, and do please come along in the future as well. Thank you so much. Thank you for your questions. Thank you, Angela. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE Events soon.