Conference Program

In contemporary digital culture, traditional femininity has re-emerged not simply as ideology but as a highly mediated practice. While scholarship on “tradwives” has largely examined Anglophone contexts marked by explicit political radicalisation (Proctor, 2022; Sykes & Hopner, 2024), less attention has been paid to culturally situated forms of platformed motherhood in Southern Europe (Abidin, 2018).

Focusing on Italy, this study shifts the analytical lens from overtly ideological tradwife communities to the figure of the “digital mother”: a content creator who narrativises everyday practices of care, domestic labour, and maternal devotion through social media.

Drawing on feminist media studies and a critical reinterpretation of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), the paper examines how what Friedan described as “the problem that has no name” is rearticulated within regimes of digital visibility. Rather than interpreting these practices as a simple revival of pre-feminist domestic ideology, we conceptualise platformed motherhood as embedded in neoliberal media economies structured by visibility, affective performance, and monetisation (Banet-Weiser & Reinis, 2025).

In line with research on mediatized motherhood and sharenting (Mascheroni et al., 2023), maternal self-representation online emerges as both care practice and identity performance shaped by gendered norms (Butler, 1990) and platform infrastructures (Van Dijck, 2013).

Methodologically, the study combines digital ethnography (Varis, 2021) and in-depth interviews, with qualitative data analysed using NVivo (Mortelmans, 2019). We first map the semantic and ideological boundaries of “tradwife” across online communities, including Reddit, before shifting to the Italian context. Although explicit self-identification as tradwife remains rare in Italy, family-oriented influencers increasingly frame motherhood and domestic labour as sites of personal fulfilment, moral legitimacy, and entrepreneurial opportunity. Through in-depth interviews with Italian content creators active on Instagram and TikTok, we examine how they negotiate selfhood, agency, visibility, and economic participation.

Preliminary findings suggest that contemporary platformed femininity is not sustained by domestic exclusion but reorganised through regimes of visibility in which care becomes publicly narrated and economically valorised. In this context, platformed motherhood functions as an informal site of socialisation in which gender norms are narrativised, aestheticised, and stabilised. Through algorithmic amplification and affective engagement, everyday care is reframed as both entrepreneurial opportunity and personal choice.