The tradwives of the settler imagination: Terra Sage Wallin, The Grammar of Return: Tradition, Gendered Performance, and Moral Formation in the Digital TradWife Movement, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The tradwives of the settler imagination: Terra Sage Wallin, The Grammar of Return: Tradition, Gendered Performance, and Moral Formation in the Digital TradWife Movement, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2026

05Nov26

Abstract: This thesis examines how “return” operates as a grammar of moral formation in the digital TradWife movement. Across Instagram, TikTok, conferences, influencer accounts, and land-based communities, calls to return to tradition, femininity, the home, God, the body, and the land organize a moral world in which recently assembled practices come to feel inherited, coherent, and true. This thesis asks how performances that often appear hypocritical, nostalgic, or overly staged become persuasive, how audiences participate in sustaining them, and how their affective appeal becomes tied to broader projects of gender hierarchy, Christian nationalism, racial belonging, and settler attachment to land. Methodologically, the thesis draws on digital ethnography, close reading, platform analysis, and performance theory. Its archive includes TradWife and homesteading content collected from Instagram and TikTok between 2024 and 2026; the online persona and comment sections of Christ With Cali; the platformed gender discourse of Savanna Faith Stone; Turning Point USA’s 2025 Young Women’s Leadership Summit; and Return To The Land, a white identitarian settlement project in Arkansas. The analysis brings these materials into conversation with scholarship on religion and media, affect, ethical formation, invented tradition, professional wrestling, Christian nationalism, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty. The thesis argues that return becomes powerful through repetition, participation, and scale. In digital TradWife media, tradition is staged through kayfabe: a performed reality sustained by creators, audiences, critics, and platforms. Viewers may believe, expose, mock, defend, or parody the performance, and each form of engagement helps keep the world of return available. As these scenes circulate, fabricated heritage becomes a lived orientation. Practices such as modest dress, submission, raw milk consumption, fertility preparation, sourdough baking, and domestic labor come to function as signs of ethical alignment. Under platform conditions, this process becomes algorithmic traditionalism: the circulation of traditionalist signs through affective intensity, ambiguity, ragebait, and engagement-driven visibility. The argument culminates in the claim that digital TradWife domesticity translates larger political and theological imaginaries into intimate form. Blood names lineage, fertility, and reproductive futurity; soil names stewardship, sacred inheritance, and land made morally available; sourdough names the repetitive domestic labor through which continuity is maintained and passed forward. In the case of Return To The Land, the grammar of return becomes territorial, organizing ancestry, membership, education, reproduction, and settlement into a project of white ecological belonging. Placed alongside Indigenous accounts of return, revitalization, refusal, and sacred land protection, this settler return appears politically uneven. Return can authorize possession and sustain obligation. It can make longing feel like belonging while also binding people to responsibilities already present in land, ceremony, sovereignty, and ancestors. Ultimately, this thesis shows that return functions as a formative grammar within digital TradWife culture. Through return, subjects learn how to feel, desire, inhabit, and defend a world that appears old precisely because it is being continually remade.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed