From Flowers to Fascism? The Cottagecore to Tradwife Pipeline on Tumblr

Abstract

In this work, we collected and analyzed social media posts to investigate an aesthetic-based pipeline where users searching for Cottagecore content may find Tradwife content co-opted by white supremacists. Through quantitative analysis of over 200,000 Tumblr posts and qualitative coding of about 2350 Tumblr posts, we did not find evidence of an explicit radicalization. We found that problematic Tradwife posts found in the literature may be confined to Tradwife-only spaces, while content in the Cottagecore tag generally did not warrant extra moderation. However, we did find evidence of a mainstreaming effect in the overlap between the Tradwife and Cottagecore communities. In our qualitative analysis, there was more interaction between queer and Tradwife identities than expected based on the literature, and some Tradwives even explicitly included queer people and disavowed racism in the Tradwife community on Tumblr. This could be genuine, but we propose that this is an example of mainstreaming, where white supremacists re-brand their content and follow platform norms to spread ideologies that would otherwise be rejected. In addition, through temporal analysis, we observed a change in the central tags used by Tradwives in the Cottagecore tag pre- and post-2021. Initially, these posts focused on aesthetics and hobbies like baking and gardening, but post-2021, the central tags focused more on religion, traditional gender roles, and homemaking—all of which align with white supremacist rhetoric about womanhood.

Keywords

social media aesthetics gender radicalization Tradwife Cottagecore network analysis content analysis

Introduction

Social media can be a great way to research new hobbies and connect with others with similar interests, especially if there’s a handy keyword like “Cottagecore” that encompasses a lifestyle you’re interested in learning more about. But what happens when this keyword returns results that look similar to the content you’re looking for, but also contain reactionary rhetoric? In this vein, Barbeau et al. theorize about a potential pipeline to online extremism called the “Cottagecore to Tradwife” pipeline (Barbeau et al., 2022). Some worry that through this pipeline, users intending to engage in innocuous Cottagecore content may end up viewing and amplifying potentially harmful Tradwife content (Barbeau et al., 2022, p. 23). This begs the question, how much overlap is there between Cottagecore enjoyers and Tradwives, and how are ideas about gender, race, and identity exchanged between the two?

Cottagecore refers to content and content creators who post pastoral, idyllic, and rural lifestyles online (O’Luanaigh, 2023). Some typical Cottagecore imagery includes rural scenery, feminine dress, and lush gardens (O’Luanaigh, 2023). Tradwives, or “traditional wives,” are part of an anti-modern movement that embraces traditional gender roles in which women are the primary caretakers in their families and do not work outside the home (O’Luanaigh, 2023; Zahay, 2022). Traditional feminism has been described as a set of values and philosophies designed to “win over” women and persuade them to reject feminism, and it is used by white supremacist communities to build their movements (Proctor, 2023).

Tradwives value the same hobbies and aesthetics seen in Cottagecore, like homemaking, feminine dress, and rural scenery, but they emphasize the role of the husband in these activities and perform them to serve a partner or be a good wife, sometimes accompanying their posts with tags like #nationalism and #tradlife (Leidig, 2023). Although Tradwife content is not inherently extremist, the literature identifies a high potential for co-opting of this content by white supremacists due to its proximity to both the popular Cottagecore aesthetic and the weaponization of womanhood as a tool for enforcing white supremacist ideals. Posts in online Cottagecore and Tradwife communities can serve as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989) that simultaneously participate in aesthetic exchange and discourse while introducing extremist content in the form of dog-whistles and suggestive imagery. Such posts can be interpreted as mundane by Cottagecore enthusiasts and may even be propagated by them, while harboring a clear extremist meaning to far-right users.

To discern whether and how extensively Tradwife and Cottagecore content may overlap in online spaces, potentially leading to exposure to extremist content, we performed a mixed-methods analysis of the “Cottagecore to Tradwife pipeline” on Tumblr. Specifically, we collected and analyzed social media posts to investigate the existence of a pipeline between Cottagecore aesthetics and Tradwife aesthetics that might lead users searching for Cottagecore content to view Tradwife content co-opted by white supremacists. We investigated instances of explicit white supremacy and radicalization of the environment (also known as mainstreaming).

Through hashtag-based network analysis of over 200,000 Tumblr posts and content analysis of about 2350 Tumblr posts, we did not find clear evidence of explicit white supremacist content in the overlap between Cottagecore and Tradwife communities on Tumblr. However, we did find evidence of Tradwife content in this overlap with mainstreaming versions of white supremacist ideologies. We found that Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag included some progressive messaging, which at first seemed promising, but may have been an effort to appeal to the norms of the Cottagecore tag and Tumblr at large. In addition, through temporal analysis, we observed a change in the central tags used by Tradwives in the Cottagecore tag pre- and post-2021. Tag use shifted from posts focused on aesthetics and hobbies like baking and gardening to tags about homemaking and traditional gender roles, which align with white supremacist rhetoric about womanhood.

Literature Review

Cottagecore Aesthetics

Cottagecore appeared on Tumblr in 2017 and was popular at first among the LGBTQ+ community, particularly queer women (O’Luanaigh, 2023). The aesthetic was reminiscent of the lesbian-feminist communes of the 1970s and allowed queer women to see themselves in pioneering narratives, which potentially reinforces the belief that rural spaces are ripe for the taking and more easily “queered” (Barbeau et al., 2022; Ryan and Tileva, 2022, p. 169). Though liberating for some, this still reinforced and reflected white supremacist and colonialist rhetorics, but with slight flexibility in the family structure. O’Luanaigh argues that “The covert moral positioning and romanticisation of the past makes the Cottagecore aesthetic reactionary, appearing to favor returning to a past status quo and modes of living, and vulnerable to exploitation by reactionary actors” (O’Luanaigh, 2023, para. 5). O’Luanaigh notes that mainstream Cottagecore overlooks the socio-political realities of this idealized past, like misogyny, sexism, and racism.

Despite this, Barbeau et al. (2022) suggest that Cottagecore was also reclaimed by transgender people and people of color, not only queer white women looking to appropriate rural life. In this way, Cottagecore acts as a way for queer people and people of color to participate in hobbies like baking, making jam, and wearing feminine clothing while consciously acknowledging and rejecting the colonialist undertones of these aesthetics.

The Cottagecore aesthetic does not necessarily encourage the adoption of the Cottagecore lifestyle in offline life. “Cottagecore as a performative practice allows queer people to revel in a fictional frontier lifestyle for their own enjoyment, without concern for its actualization,” according to Ryan and Tileva (2022, p. 165). The fact that the Cottagecore lifestyle is financially unattainable for most of its aesthetic adherents is acknowledged in these spaces, and Cottagecore instead provides an opportunity for temporary escape in a relatively inexpensive and non-restrictive way (Ryan and Tileva, 2022). The barrier to entry is low: one can participate in the Cottagecore aesthetic and benefit from it by only posting online. This makes posting Cottagecore images seem innocuous. However, the aesthetic qualities of Cottagecore posts and the complex interplay of whiteness, queerness, reclamation, and colonialism in these spaces may present an avenue for white supremacist actors to appropriate this content for their own gains.

Tradwife Aesthetics

Like Cottagecore, Tradwife personas are also performances for social media. Leidig (2023) notes the extensive use of Pinterest by Tradwives, as well as other social media sites like YouTube and Instagram. Zahay goes even further and says that “the increasingly visual nature of mainstream platforms” calls attention to the way that politics (in this case, anti-feminist populism) is “visually performed and displayed on our screens,” and how alt-right women influencers take advantage of this visual medium to spread their message (Zahay, 2022, p. 172). Proctor (2023) also notes that Tradwife postings are “performances for social media audiences” (p. 14).

Unlike Cottagecore, however, Tradwife content is not limited to online participation. Tradwives encourage explicit ideologies and changes in lifestyle, which can be dangerous for some women who make changes in their offline lives. According to Proctor (2023), “Tradwife is not just an aesthetic style or pandemic fad; it is, for many women, an identity” (p. 7). The characterization of women as domestic figures is a tried and true tactic of white supremacist actors to build their movement and gain popular support with women, and this is echoed by modern far-right influencers online (Salice, 2019). For example, far-right political activist Lauren Southern’s YouTube content appealed to women’s desire for stability, purpose, and community by rejecting feminism as the source of women’s problems and embracing a strict gendered hierarchy (Salice, 2019), and in Tradwife vlogs, the lifestyle is branded as an appealing alternative to the “girlboss grind” (Zahay, 2022). While most popular Tradwife content seems to ignore the ramifications of these extreme gender roles, some women do acknowledge the drawbacks of the lifestyle. For instance, on Tradwife subreddits like Red Pill Wives, stories of domestic abuse are prolific (Leidig, 2023). Even Lauren Southern herself revealed in 2024 that fully embracing a rigid, over-simplified Tradwife lifestyle led to an abusive marriage, and she knew other conservative influencers in similar positions (Harrington, 2024).

Tradwife content is not only potentially dangerous for the individual women who adopt the lifestyle. The construction of women as domestic figures serves multiple goals: it subjugates and controls women within the movement, and it allows for womanhood to be weaponized against marginalized groups and opposition. This has implications for women who are not involved in the Tradwife lifestyle, with some Tradwives advocating against childcare, protections for women in the workplace, and college for women (Del Valle, 2023). For some Tradwives, the only way to be happy is to actualize the Tradwife lifestyle, ignoring structural racism and inequalities: “If you’re poor, it’s because your husband is failing to provide for your family. If you don’t have a husband, you haven’t been listening to God’s plan. If you’re queer, WELL, you should be miserable” (Petersen, 2023, para. 13).

White Supremacist Aesthetics

White supremacists build power by exploiting vulnerabilities in mainstream culture (Belew, 2022), and the Tradwife aesthetic is one such vulnerability. Tradwives are not all anti-feminist or white nationalists, but “the Tradwife movement appeals to and supports an infrastructure of white supremacy” along with being fundamentally sexist (Proctor, 2023, p. 10). “The community’s hunger for the distinct boundaries of the past makes it vulnerable to far-right messaging,” and Tradwives and white nationalists share core values like pro-natalism, myths of the West’s moral decline, and similar iconography (Leidig, 2023, p. 98).

Specifically, the aesthetics of Tradwife content are easily accessed by the mainstream through its similarity to Cottagecore, but they can also refer to explicit white supremacist aesthetics. For example, Cottagecore and Tradwife content’s emphasis on pastoralism and agricultural life heavily overlaps with white supremacist propaganda. An image of a rural cottage found in a white nationalist telegram channel would not look out of place in a search for #Cottagecore, except for the inclusion of “heimat,” the German word for homeland, and the Othala rune, both used in Nazi propaganda (O’Luanaigh, 2023). In addition, photos of a family gathering might not be inherently political, but when accompanied by hashtags like #nationalism and #tradlife, this signals the politics of the all-white nuclear family unit, and taps into the far-right’s focus on the household as a political statement (Leidig, 2023).

Apart from explicit references to white supremacy, the Tradwife aesthetic promotes white nationalist ideals through subtle suggestion. According to Zahay (2022), “Often without any explicit references to the political, their (Tradwife vloggers’) aesthetic presentation argues that the traditional, gendered role of wife and mother is the only natural and fulfilling responsibility for women” (p. 177). Even if Tradwife posts do not contain explicit hate symbols or rhetoric, they still normalize and idealize a version of femininity that aligns with white supremacist ideals and is rife for appropriation.

The Hashtag Pipeline

Both Cottagecore and Tradwife content is accessed on social media sites through hashtags and search. Ryan and Tileva (2022) note the hashtag search feature that provides easy access to Cottagecore content, meaning those looking to seek out Cottagecore content might go to the search bar to find it. In the same way that Cottagecore posts are promoted with tags like Cottagecore, Tradwives use hashtags like #tradlife and #tradwife to build a community online (Leidig, 2023). Although hashtags are not the only way that people navigate content, Tumblr’s rich culture of tag usage (Bourlai, 2018) makes tag analysis a suitable tool to study the overlap between these two communities.

Hashtags have also been identified as a vehicle for far-right extremist groups to spread their ideology. Hashtags on Twitter that were associated with extremist ideology were found in the same tweets with hashtags associated with mainstream ideologies, a coordinated tactic known as hashtag hijacking, and far-right groups have also been observed attempting to re-interpret or occupy specific terms (Graham, 2016; Rothut et al., 2024). Given the mainstream popularity of Cottagecore, the aesthetic similarities between Tradwife and Cottagecore content, and the ideological similarities between Tradwife and white-supremacist messaging, it is easy to see why Tradwife content might be a target for this hijacking, and there is some literature that shows this overlap already. For example, O’Luanaigh found a few cases of what seemed to be deliberate overlap of Tradwife and Cottagecore hashtags to increase the likelihood of Cottagecore enjoyers being shown Tradwife content (O’Luanaigh, 2023). In addition, some TikToks posted with #cottagecore and #tradwife also included explicitly extremist or white supremacist tags (O’Luanaigh, 2023; Proctor, 2023). This extends to other benign searches, like beauty tips and wardrobe advice that might lead women to alt-right content that is aesthetically indistinguishable from innocuous content in searches (Zahay, 2022). This pipeline was defined explicitly by Barbeau et al., who posit that users intending to engage in mostly innocuous Cottagecore content end up viewing and amplifying potentially harmful Tradwife content (Barbeau et al., 2022).

However, Graham notes that although a user may come across extremism while searching for tweets by hashtag, that does not mean they wish to learn more about extremism or adopt extremist ideology (Graham, 2016). Similarly, Chen et al. cast doubt on the idea of a pipeline as a way to spread extremism. They found that viewers of extremist videos on YouTube already have high levels of gender and racial resentment and follow external links to the videos, not some pathway of hashtags (Chen et al., 2023). Winter et al. (2021) also note that there is a tendency to assume that the mere existence of propaganda material equals consumption by audiences and influences on them. In this vein, even if extremist propaganda does exist in the #tradwife tag, it might not be consumed by or have influence on Cottagecore enjoyers.

Tradwives, Cottagecore, and Mainstreaming

Just because individuals might not be convinced by content they see during a hashtag search, that does not mean this content has no effect on the online ecosystem. According to Rothut et al., to achieve their goals inconspicuously, extremists adapt the presentation of their narratives to fit within mainstream content, also known as mainstreaming. This tactic shifts broader public perception imperceptibly toward the extremes and gives extremists an increased chance of integrating their views into society (Rothut et al., 2024). Marwick et al. (2022) agree that “The internet does not cause radicalization, but it helps spread extremist ideas, enables people interested in these ideas to form communities, and mainstreams conspiracy theories and distrust in institutions.” For example, the National Socialist Movement adjusted their social media to remove Nazi imagery and replaced it with American Nationalism, and saw recruitment numbers increase (Smith, 2023). This tactic is also used by far-right women influencers who appropriate pre-existing digital cultures like homemaking, self-help, and food blogging to seem relatable and gain or retain followers (Leidig, 2023). More specifically, Tradwife vloggers’ videos create the appearance of support by repeating aesthetics that are performed by trusted influencers, which “primes audiences and introduces them to new pathways of extremism” (Zahay, 2022, p. 177).

Mainstreaming can also lead to the disassociation of radical or extremist ideology from the actors pushing that ideology (Rothut et al., 2024). For example, Paul (2021) describes a “metapolitical whiteness” where white supremacists strategically re-frame themselves as disadvantaged and disenfranchised, disassociating whiteness from domination while calling on white supremacist histories, reviving them, and moving them back to the political center. Apart from explicit references to white supremacy, the Tradwife aesthetic promotes white nationalist ideals through subtle suggestion. According to Zahay (2022), “Often without any explicit references to the political, their (Tradwife vloggers’) aesthetic presentation argues that the traditional, gendered role of wife and mother is the only natural and fulfilling responsibility for women” (p. 177). In their analysis of the feminine appeals of white Christian nationalism, Mikkelsen and Kornfield note that the figure of white Christian femininity is deployed against secular others and racial minorities not through overt racism, which is rejected as un-Christlike and un-American, but through the control and weaponization of white women’s bodies (Mikkelsen and Kornfield, 2021); white womanhood can be weaponized against marginalized groups and opposition while disguised as discourse about what it means to be a woman. In this case, Tradwife posts do not contain explicit hate symbols or rhetoric, yet they still normalize and idealize a version of femininity that aligns with white supremacist ideals.

With this framing, even if the hijacking of the Cottagecore and Tradwife tags did not radicalize individuals, it could shift public perception of feminism, women’s rights, and domestic labor to the right, facilitating the weaponization of white womanhood as a tool in the white supremacist toolbelt. Hijacking the Tradwife hashtag disassociates white nationalism and white supremacy from these ideals, replacing them with the narrative that it is a woman’s choice to stay at home and live the Tradwife lifestyle. Zahay notes that “to combat the obvious critiques of misogyny, many self-identified Tradwives use feminist rhetoric to frame the movement as a choice they are making about how to live their own lives as empowered women” (Proctor, 2023, p. 7).

The benign appearance of Tradwife content and the white supremacist rhetoric of women as apolitical and submissive may also assist in mainstreaming white supremacist ideas on social media. Social media companies fail to recognize far-right women influencers as dangerous (Leidig, 2023), and the Tradwife movement’s “hyper feminine aesthetic” works to mask the “authoritarianism of their ideology” (Kelly, 2018, para. 8). Cottagecore content is also not exempt from this critique, and according to O’Luanaigh, tech companies need to consider how content that is not explicitly violative may still contribute to radicalization processes, and how “contextually-heavy content, such as Cottagecore content, may slip through the cracks of content moderation efforts” (O’Luanaigh, 2023, para. 25). Thiel and McCain (2022) also note that “white is beautiful” style content is allowed on mainstream platforms due to the lack of overt white supremacist messaging, and on less mainstream platforms like Gab images with the same aesthetics are posted with overtly white supremacist content (p. 22).

Conclusion from the Literature

Overall, the current literature shows that online aesthetics are not only entertaining—these communities built around imagery and hobbies are also political battlegrounds where ideas about femininity, womanhood, colonization, and queerness are constantly being re-negotiated through the claiming and re-claiming of certain aesthetics. In this work, we asked three research questions to investigate how this exchange of ideas may have produced a pipeline from Tradwife content to white supremacist content on Tumblr. First, at-scale, how much did Tradwife and Cottagecore communities on Tumblr overlap? Second, to what extent were Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag explicitly white supremacist? Finally, to what extent did Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag mainstream white supremacist ideals?

Methods

To investigate the Cottagecore to Tradwife pipeline on social media, we collected posts from the blogging site Tumblr using the Tumblr API.¹ We chose Tumblr both because of the availability of data (posts can be found all the way back to 2010) and because Cottagecore originated on Tumblr and had a well-established presence on the platform (O’Luanaigh, 2023).

Author Positionality

The first, third, and last authors self-identified as US white American, and the second author self-identified as Chinese/Asian. As white people, the first, third, and last authors have not experienced negative consequences of and may have benefited from white supremacy, which limits their understanding of how white supremacy is experienced and expressed. In addition, the authors did not participate in the communities of study explicitly, but some were raised in communities that prioritized traditional gender roles. The authors avoided bias in the methodology by building the codebook from examples found in the literature.

Data

Tumblr is part blogging platform, part social network, and was launched in 2007. The platform supports multimodal blog posting, including but not limited to text, audio, and video posts. It includes social media functions such as the ability to “like” and “reblog” a post and direct message other users. Tumblr also includes the ability to follow other users’ blogs and provides a “dashboard” where these posts can be viewed (Dixon, 2024). As of 2019, Tumblr had surpassed 472 million registered accounts, and Tumblr users mostly reside in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada (Bianchi, 2024; Dixon, 2024).

We collected posts by searching for specific hashtags guided by literature, which references search and tags as a vehicle for the potential pipeline (Leidig, 2023; O’Luanaigh, 2023; Zahay, 2022).

Quantitative Analysis

To quantitatively investigate the Cottagecore to Tradwife pipeline on Tumblr, we used a dataset of 223,748 original posts collected using #cottagecore. We chose to use posts from January 2018 to December 2024 since, as seen in Figure 1, Cottagecore content was posted mostly after 2018. This follows trends mentioned in the literature, for example, that Cottagecore posts spiked in late 2020 to early 2021 during COVID-19 lockdowns (O’Luanaigh, 2023). Since hashtags on Tumblr are case-sensitive, we converted all tags to lowercase before analysis.

Figure 1.

Number of Cottagecore posts over time on Tumblr. This matches trends in the literature and shows that most posts were made after 2018.

Tag Co-occurrence Networks

We used tag co-occurrence networks to explore the hashtag landscape in Cottagecore and Tradwife posts on Tumblr. In these networks, each node is a tag, and each link represents how many times two tags were used together in the same post. For example, if #cottagecore and #vintage were used in 10 posts together, they would be connected with a link of weight 10.

Often, these “raw” networks were too large to visualize, or they contained too many irrelevant hashtags that were only posted by a few users. To resolve this, we used K-core decomposition to extract the core of the tag co-occurrence network, or the tags that were posted most often and posted together multiple times. K-core decomposition trims the network by recursively eliminating nodes of a certain degree, resulting in a smaller network of more densely connected nodes and including only nodes of a certain degree or higher recursively.

This trimmed tag co-occurrence network approximates the landscape of topics frequently discussed in the tags of posts on Tumblr. Topics that are discussed together more often are closer together, so the network represents how users might find new content from content they already consume.

Tradwife Posts in the Cottagecore Tag

First, we examined how likely a user is to find Tradwife content when searching for #cottagecore by calculating the proportion of Tradwife content in this tag. We could have just counted the number of posts with #tradwife in our dataset, but this may have missed important content that was tagged with other similar hashtags. To catch more Tradwife content, we used a tag co-occurrence network to understand which tags were often posted alongside #tradwife. Then, we used K-core decomposition to trim the network and obtain a small set of candidate tags. The final set of Tradwife keywords was chosen based on the literature and included “traditional femininity,” “traditional gender roles,” “tradblr,” “tradcat,” “tradfem,” “traditional,” “tradwife,” and “traditional wife.” Then, using these keywords, we calculated the proportion of Tradwife posts that could be found by searching for #Cottagecore on Tumblr.

Temporal Analysis

To assess mainstreaming in the overlap between Cottagecore and Tradwife communities, we analyzed the overlap of the two communities at two time slices. We gathered all posts from our dataset that included at least one Tradwife hashtag from our keyword list, which included 2499 posts made between January 2018 and December 2024 by 248 unique users. This constitutes the overlap between the Cottagecore and Tradwife communities on Tumblr (see Figure 2). Based on the high proportion of Tradwife posts made during 2021 (see Figure 3), we then split this set into posts made before 1 January 2021 and posts made after 1 January 2022. We hypothesized that the tags used pre-2021 would significantly differ from the tags used in post-2022 because most Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag were made during 2021. This flood of posts could have had a mainstreaming effect, where white supremacist ideals were introduced into the Tradwife community, absorbed, and then exposed to those searching for Cottagecore content. Of course, there were also many other cultural and political shifts that occurred during this period, so any conclusions drawn from this analysis should consider Tumblr as a part of a larger media ecosystem.

Figure 2.

This Venn Diagram illustrates the population of interest. Here we collected posts with the tag #Cottagecore, which is the large white circle. The dark gray circle indicates Tradwife posts. The majority of our analysis concerned the light gray portion, or the overlap between these two communities, since we were interested in the Tradwife posts that one might find by searching for #Cottagecore.

Figure 3.

The proportion of Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag over time on Tumblr. Tradwife content was more prevalent (7 out of every 100 posts) during 2021, presumably due to Power User activity, and this continued into 2022. Otherwise, there was about 1 Tradwife post per 100 posts in the Cottagecore tag.

Visualizing the Tag Landscape

We used temporal tag co-occurrence networks to visualize how the landscape of Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag changed over time, especially before and after 2021. We built two tag co-occurrence networks using the posts in the overlap dataset described above. We visualized these networks using Gephi (Bastian et al., 2009). We trimmed the network to a manageable size for visualization (approximately 130 nodes) using weighted K-core decomposition before visualization and used the Force Atlas layout with some adjustments to increase label visibility. The size of the node was mapped to degree, and the color intensity corresponds to the proximity of that tag to the tag #cottagecore. The darker the node, the more times it appeared in the Cottagecore tag.

Frequency of Tags

We also plotted the relative frequency of tags used pre-2021 and post-2022 in our overlap dataset. We used the package Shifterator (Gallagher et al., 2021) to calculate the proportion shift, which is the difference in relative frequencies of a word in two texts, or in our case, a tag in two different time slices of Tumblr posts. If the difference is positive, then the tag is relatively more common in the second slice, and if it is negative, then the word is relatively more common in the first slice. A word shift graph ranks tags by this difference and plots them. This graph allowed us to see how the use of tags changed in our overlap dataset before and after 2021.

Qualitative Analysis

To assess the potential for radicalization, we conducted a content analysis of the posts that made up the suspected pipeline—Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag. In total, we coded 2352 posts, as some posts were removed in the time between coding and data collection. Through observation of the entire post, including images, captions, and hashtags, we measured what proportion of these posts contained problematic white supremacist content. We identified two levels of problematic content for both images and text. Level 1 included explicit white supremacist symbols and hate speech. Level 2 included posts that discussed nationalism, callback to past values, Nordic imagery, and other non-explicit signals of potential white supremacist content. We also measured the occurrence of reclamation of the Tradwife identity by queer people and people of color by coding for evidence of anti-racist or anti-homophobic content. We coded posts from the overlap dataset (see Figure 2). The posts were coded by two researchers, and a sample was coded by both to ensure intercoder reliability. The full codebook can be seen in Table 1, and the Fleiss’ kappa scores for each code can be seen in Table 2.

Table 1.

Codebook for Content Analysis.

Label	Definition
White Supremacist Imagery	Includes runes, hate symbols, and any imagery that explicitly promotes white supremacy. If you are unsure, mark this as true for further examination. If the image is used to denounce white supremacy, mark 0. Level 1: explicit hate symbols (mark 2) Level 2: runes, Sonnenrad-icons, Nordic imagery (mark 1)
White Supremacist Text	Includes callbacks to past values, nationalism, or other explicitly white supremacist text in the post or tags. If you are unsure, mark this as true for further examination. If the post text is denouncing white supremacy, mark 0 and mark 1 for POC/LGBTQ+ representation text. Level 1: explicit hate speech (mark 2) Level 2: callbacks to past values, nationalism, links to suspicious telegram channels, mentions of going back to a natural state (mark 1)
POC/LGBTQ Representation Imagery	Pictures of POC, pictures of queer relationships, queer flags, or queer symbols. POC includes anyone who is not white. We are looking for a lower bound here, so if you are unsure if someone is a POC or if there is not enough information, mark 0.
POC/LGBTQ Representation Text	Posts with content supporting or representing POC/LGBTQ people in the text or tags of the post. POC includes anyone who is not white. Acronyms like “mlm” and “wlw” should be marked as 1. Narration in a video should be counted as text.

Table 2.

Results and Fleiss’ Kappa for Each Code Indicating High-Interrater Reliability and Little to No White Supremacist Content.

Code	White Supremacist Imagery	White Supremacist Text	POC/LGBTQ Representation Imagery	POC/LGBTQ Representation Text
Fleiss’ kappa	1.0 (n = 668)	1.0 (n = 668)	0.86 (n = 207)	1.0 (n = 207)
Sampled posts	0 (0%)	7 (0.3%)	61 (2.6%)	59 (2.5%)

Results

Research Question 1: At-Scale, How Much Did Tradwife and Cottagecore Communities on Tumblr Overlap?

In our dataset, we found that only 1.1% of Cottagecore posts contained Tradwife tags (2499 out of 223,784 posts). Looking at the proportion of Tradwife posts over time (see Figure 3), Tradwife content was more prevalent (7 out of every 100 posts) during 2021, and this continued into 2022 (4 out of every 100 posts). Otherwise, there was about 1 Tradwife post per 100 posts in the Cottagecore tag, with some fluctuation. One caveat is that Tumblr users have options to curate their feeds in ways that might prioritize certain posts based on engagement. However, overall, users were not likely to encounter Tradwife content when searching for Cottagecore posts on Tumblr unless they viewed hundreds of posts at a time, but users who did view many posts were likely served Tradwife content.

Research Question 2: To What Extent Were Tradwife Posts in the Cottagecore Tag Explicitly Radicalizing?

Content Analysis

The content analysis revealed that there were only seven (0.3%) Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag that had white supremacist or extremist content, and even these posts were not as extreme as the examples mentioned in the literature. These posts included callbacks to past values, mentions of nationalism, and links to suspicious Telegram channels, and while they could be considered white supremacist when viewed from the least charitable perspective, there were no overt calls for an ethnostate, swastikas, or active recruitment (O’Luanaigh, 2023, para. 18–19).

RQ3: To What Extent Did Tradwife Posts in the Cottagecore Tag Mainstream Reactionary Ideals?

Content Analysis

In our content analysis, we found that the group of Tradwives who were posting in the Cottagecore tag were more diverse than those described in prior literature. The posts were not exclusively of white Christian straight women, with some featuring women of color and queer relationships. Overall, 2.6% of Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag included images of POC or LGBTQ+ people, and 2.5% included text that indicated anti-racist/anti-homophobic views. There were some examples of posts that explicitly welcomed people of color, queer people, and other marginalized groups into the Tradwife community and disavowed white supremacy. These posts presented the Tradwife community as a space for anyone, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality. There were also posts that were made by queer and POC users who were carving out a space for themselves within the Tradwife lifestyle.

Overall, our analysis indicates that the limited Tradwife content in mainstream spaces was welcoming rather than radicalizing. Perhaps this was the same reclamation of the Cottagecore identity by marginalized communities identified in the literature. However, while Cottagecore could fairly easily be appropriated by reclaiming specific hobbies and styles, it is more difficult to separate strict gender roles from the Tradwife lifestyle. One example is the ”Chadwife” identity, which seemed to be a (perhaps satirical) attempt to discredit and simultaneously reclaim the identity of homemaker for queer people. Alternatively, these posts could be explained through the lens of mainstreaming. Tumblr was a hub for transgender people, at least before platform changes in 2018, so this could be a case of Tradwives specifically making space for queer identities to fit platform norms (Haimson et al., 2021). There is evidence of far-right groups accepting gay members as a concession to expand recruitment, and these efforts often also employ racism in an effort to turn white queer people against POC (Briar Dickey and van Klingeren, 2022; Foster and Kirke, 2023; Magni and Reynolds, 2023). Similarly, Tradwife posts that claim to welcome anyone regardless of identity may serve to bring more people into the fold while mainstreaming ideals about womanhood that ultimately serve a white supremacist cause. For example, you can be queer or non-white and participate in the Tradwife community, but you must also accept those who push for anti-feminist ideas like women are meant to be in the home and serving their husbands.

Temporal Analysis

Figure 4 shows that most users posted between 1 and 10 posts, and there was one user who posted thousands of posts. This is not surprising; often social media activity follows a long-tailed distribution. For example, among adult US users on Twitter, the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets (Stefan Wojcik and Hughes, 2019). It appears that this “Power User” joined Tumblr in 2021 and was responsible for the spike in posts during 2021 that we identified earlier (see Figure 5). Their content included reactionary tags like #modesty, #babies, #modestcottagecore, and #traditional posted in over 1400 posts in our dataset. We excluded this Power User from most of our analysis to avoid attributing effects to only one user, but even without this user, we still saw a qualitative difference between posts in our dataset before and after this spike of reactionary tags.

Figure 4.

The distribution of posts made by each blog in our overlap dataset. 100% of blogs had at least 1 post, 10% of blogs had at least ten posts, and 1% of blogs had at least 70 posts. The majority of blogs had between one and ten posts, and a small percentage were much more active. There was one “Power User” who posted thousands of posts.

Figure 5.

Number of Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag over time on Tumblr, split between Power User and all other users. This shows a spike of posts with Tradwife-related hashtags during 2021, mostly made by Power User.

As seen in Figure 6, as we hypothesized, the hashtag landscape changed significantly before and after 2021. Pre-2021 Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore space were mainly concerned with a few Tradwife-specific tags like #tradfem and #tradcat and other aesthetic-related tags like #flowercore, #forestcore, and #traditional style. Post-2022 posts in the same space shifted to focus more on the role of women in the home and as a wife, for example, #traditional gender roles, #homemaker and the use of #tradwife over #tradfem.

Figure 6.

Proportion shift graph comparing tags used in the overlap of Tradwife posts in the #Cottagecore tag pre-2021 and post-2022 made with Shifterator. This excludes posts made by Power User. Any tags used to collect posts were grayed out. The graph shows how the use of tags changed before and after 2021. Pre-2021, the highest-ranked tags were focused on aesthetics, while post-2022, the highest-ranked tags focused on religion, traditional gender roles, and homemaking.

In addition, this same trend is supported by the visualizations of the tag-co-occurrence networks. Although the visualization is less precise, we can still observe which tags appeared close to #cottagecore and which appeared peripheral in the network. In the pre-2021 network (see Figure 7), aesthetic-related tags like #flowercore, #forestcore, and #goblincore made up much of the network, along with hobbies like baking and gardening. Post-2022 tags (see Figure 8) focused on motherhood, religion, and homemaking, for example, #traditional gender roles, #homemaking, #stay at home wife, and #biblical womanhood appeared larger and closer to #cottagecore. Notably, this network also included #inclusive homemaking, which is another potential example of mainstreaming.

Figure 7.

The tag co-occurrence network created from the overlap of Tradwife posts in the #Cottagecore tag pre-2021. We excluded Power User from this visualization. We trimmed the network to a manageable size (130 nodes) using weighted K-core decomposition before visualization and used the Force Atlas layout with some adjustments to increase label visibility. The size of the node was mapped to degree, and the nodes are colored according to how many times they were posted in the same post as #Cottagecore. Darker nodes were posted with #Cottagecore more often. Compared to the post-2022 visualization we can see a focus on aesthetic-related tags like #flowercore and #forestcore and hobbies like gardening and fashion.

Figure 8.

The tag co-occurrence network created from the overlap of Tradwife posts in the #Cottagecore tag post-2022. We excluded Power User from this visualization. We trimmed the network to a manageable size (130 nodes) using weighted K-core decomposition before visualization and used the Force Atlas layout with some adjustments to increase label visibility. The size of the node was mapped to degree, and the nodes are colored according to how many times they were posted in the same post as #Cottagecore. Darker nodes were posted with #Cottagecore more often. Compared to the pre-2021 visualization, we can see more emphasis on tags reflecting a view of womanhood aligned with white supremacist goals, for example, #traditional gender roles and #stay at home wife. On the other hand, this network also includes the tag #inclusive homemaking, which appears to subvert this trend but could be an example of mainstreaming.

We did not see the same change in tag topics pre-2021 and post-2022 for Cottagecore in general (see Figure 9). The Cottagecore tag included many more posts, so perhaps these changes would be visible for other small communities within the tag, but overall, it appears that the main tags posted in the Cottagecore community remained focused on benign aesthetics and hobbies. Even though Cottagecore was identified as a target for appropriation due to colonialist undertones, for the queer people who popularized Cottagecore, this tag was already a vehicle for political speech against colonialism, racism, and homophobia. Perhaps this awareness inoculated the Cottagecore tag against appropriation by white supremacist ideals, or perhaps the sheer amount of posts made it resistant. Further research is needed to understand if this inoculation is platform-specific, or if it extends outside Tumblr.

Figure 9.

Proportion shift graph comparing tags used in all posts in the #Cottagecore tag pre-2021 and post-2022, made with Shifterator. The graph shows how the use of tags changed before and after 2021, and overall, we do not see a significant shift away from aesthetic-related tags.

Although there is not much evidence of explicit white supremacist content in Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag, our analysis shows that the landscape of this overlap changed pre-and post-2021. Our analysis shows a change from internet-based aesthetics like #fairycore to a focus on religion, traditional roles of women, and the fantasy of an idyllic, pastoral lifestyle often evoked by eco-fascists and extremists (O’Luanaigh, 2023, para. 23–26). This slower, less explicit shift in values and topics indicates that even though those searching for Cottagecore content were very unlikely to be exposed to explicit white supremacist posts, they could have been exposed to Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag that normalized a view of womanhood and femininity consistent with white supremacist goals. In addition, as seen in the literature, hashtags like #traditional gender roles occupy a moderation gray area, which helps to mainstream their content. They simultaneously push the boundary and enmesh these ideas about womanhood within popular aesthetics like Cottagecore, while remaining within the boundaries of rhetoric acceptable on most platforms.

Limitations

This research is limited to posts on Tumblr, but this is just one small part of the larger social media ecosystem. Tradwife, Cottagecore, and far-right extremist content can be found on many social media sites like Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram, which all have different dynamics and users, and should be investigated to gain a cross-platform understanding of this phenomenon. The concept of mainstreaming is, by definition, a gradual and imperceptible shift, so any conclusions drawn from this research should take into account not only the broader social media landscape but also the effects of offline news and events. In addition, this research focused on a hashtag pathway, which is only one mode of interaction on Tumblr, leaving out the dynamics of reblogs, following behavior, and private messaging. Although hashtags serve as a signal for communities and post-content, the extent to which users frequently search for content with hashtags (as opposed to other avenues like following and reblogs) is beyond the scope of this analysis. As of 2025, Tumblr still allows users the option to view posts chronologically from only the blogs that they follow, rather than using a recommendation algorithm, and so we focus on user-generated communities by using hashtags as a proxy. However, a study of algorithmic recommendations could reveal more about the influence of platforms and personalization algorithms on mainstreaming and radicalization pipelines. Finally, the Tumblr API documentation (see Note 1) does not specify exactly how posts are collected, and although we gathered a significant number of posts, there is no way to guarantee a uniform random sample.

Conclusion

In this work, we asked three research questions to investigate how a potential pipeline from Cottagecore to Tradwife communities was actualized on Tumblr. First, at-scale, how much do Tradwife and Cottagecore communities on Tumblr overlap? Second, to what extent are Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag explicitly white-supremacist? Finally, to what extent do Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag mainstream white supremacist ideals?

We found that Tradwife posts made up only 1.1% of posts in the Cottagecore tag, and in these posts, there were no explicit calls to radicalization or declarations of white supremacy. Overall, our analysis does not support an explicit pipeline of radicalization, and problematic Tradwife posts found in the literature may be confined to Tradwife-only spaces. However, we did find evidence that white supremacist ideologies were mainstreamed in Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag. In our content analysis, there was more overlap between queer and Tradwife identities than expected based on the literature, and some Tradwives even explicitly included queer people and disavowed racism in the Tradwife community on Tumblr. This could be genuine, but we propose it as an example of mainstreaming, where white supremacist ideals are re-branded to follow platform norms and spread ideologies that would otherwise be rejected by Tumblr users. In addition, through temporal analysis, we observed a change in the tags used by Tradwives in the Cottagecore tag pre- and post-2021. Initially, these posts focused on aesthetics and hobbies like baking and gardening. Post-2021, the central tags focused more on religion, traditional gender roles, and homemaking, which all align with white supremacist conceptions of womanhood and family. This shift indicates that even though those looking for Cottagecore content were very unlikely to be exposed to explicit white supremacist posts, the Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag mainstreamed ideals that contribute to white supremacist weaponization of womanhood while potentially evading moderation due to their non-explicit nature.

Future research could replicate this study on other social media platforms such as Pinterest, TikTok, or YouTube, or investigate other subjects like lifestyle vlogging or nutrition. In addition, we did find one post linking out to a Telegram channel that contained white supremacist content according to our codebook, so it is possible that users are being recruited to radical communities through other mechanisms. This study focused on hashtags, but future work could investigate reblogs, following relationships, recommendation algorithms, or recruitment via private messaging. Further research could also focus on why POC and queer people post in the Tradwife tag, and attempt to untangle the complex relationship between queer identity, racial identity, and Tradwife identity on Tumblr.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Doctors Adina Gitomer and Brennan Klein for early conceptual discussions about this study. In addition, the authors thank Doctor Gitomer for feedback on a draft of this work.

ORCID iDs

Oliver Mel Allen

Yi Zu

Milo Z. Trujillo

Ethical considerations

There are no human participants in this article as defined by our institutional guidelines, and informed consent is not required.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: M. Z. Trujillo is supported by the Northeastern University Future Faculty Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

The authors will make data collection and analysis code available on a public repository prior to publication. While the study is based on publicly available Tumblr posts, the authors choose not to reproduce the posts used in the study out of privacy concerns, and to preserve the right to be forgotten should users choose to delete their posts in the future.

Notes

Author biographies

Oliver Mel Allen (MS, Northeastern University) is a researcher in the Big-5 project at Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona, Spain. Their research interests center on visual communication and aesthetics on social media, especially related to politics and nature.

Yi Zu (MS, Northeastern University) is a Master’s student in Computer Science at Northeastern University. His research interests center on social media, with a focus on digital communities and online discourse.

Milo Z. Trujillo (PhD, University of Vermont) is a Future Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow at the Network Science Insitite of Northeastern University. His research interests include how the technical design of online platforms and the social policies instated on them co-influence community behavior.

Brooke Foucault Welles (PhD, Northwestern University) is the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. Her research interests include how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, and how those networks enable the pursuit of individual, team, and collective goals.

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