Keep on Smiling Ladies!
A Case Study of Gender and Failed Parody of the #Tradwife Instagram Community
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2026.i27.1623Keywords:
Tradwives, Humour, Online communities, Social media, MultimodalityAbstract
The prominence of tradwives (a shortening for “traditional wife”) on social media has lately risen. This group is characterised by their embodiment of the Christian conservative ideal of femininity and their successful use of the multimodal affordances of social media. For this reason, tradwives have attracted the attention of scholars from linguistics and gender studies (e.g., Allen et al. 2025; Tebaldi 2023). However, a largely unexplored area is the humorous representation of this community and attempts at counteracting their anti-genderist ideas. This article delves into an example of this phenomenon: the Pleasant Woman (@pleasantville_lady), a parodic Instagram account which failed at becoming viral. Following the proposal of positioning analysis in its adaptation for social media content (Georgakopoulou 2024; Georgakopoulou and Giaxoglou 2018), all the posts and comments of @pleasantville_lady have been manually examined to analyse the role that gender and femininity play in the fictional characterisation of the Pleasant Woman and her relationship with her audience, as well as in the overall parodic goal of the account. Results show that despite its parodic nature, the fictional Pleasant Woman presents most of the linguistic and discursive traits of tradwives, whom she talks to in her captions and compels in her hashtags. Results also show that digital humorous interactions are not only taking place on social media but also mediated by the affordances of the platform on which communication unfolds.
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