"TRADWIFE" vs. "GIRLBOSS”: How Body Politics Has Manufactured New Definitions of Womanhood

Abstract

In this weakening era of neoliberal political structures, commodification of bodies, especially those of women, run rampant in post modernized societies and happens in a way that is subtle and veiled through complex digital jargon. This paper aims to find that how terms like ‘Tradwife’ and ‘Girlboss’ and phrases such as ‘lipstick on a pig’ function as regimes of body politics in digital culture. Current research on this topic shows that bodies are not natural and are socially constructed and ‘colonized’ by the state, cultural and social regulations so to ensure the conforming to set social standards. However, existing literature gap on this topic is due to the lack of explicit body politics analysis. Most studies focus on labour, ideology and feminism, but not on the body as an instrument of politics itself. The methodology used for this paper is Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), which is an interdisciplinary approach that focuses on how trends, languages and discourses perpetuate gender dynamics, inequalities and so on. Findings of this paper support the idea that these kinds of terms are not opposing models of femininity, but rather interconnected regimes of neoliberal body politics. While it may seem like ‘Girlbosses’ refer to disciplined, hardworking women fixated on the idea of productivity and self-optimization and the ‘Tradwife’ aesthetics focus more on the ‘divine-feminine’ side of women, reorienting the body towards domesticity and softness, both these terms reflect the way digital control and surveillance take place on physical entities like human bodies, essentially leading to a state of perpetual commodification. These trends help to echo the idea that women should act only in a certain way, and therefore fit into the existing labels of femininity.