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

2025-05-07

AI Summary

This study investigates whether the Cottagecore aesthetic community functions as a conduit for the covert mainstreaming of far-right ideologies—particularly Tradwife discourse. Method: Drawing on over 200,000 Tumblr posts and a manually coded sample of 2,500, it employs quantitative social network analysis, temporal tag-evolution modeling, and mixed-method qualitative coding (thematic + ideological dimensions). Contribution/Results: The study identifies no direct radicalization pathway but documents a significant discursive shift in Tradwife content within Cottagecore spaces post-2021—from lifestyle aesthetics toward religious conservatism, rigid gender hierarchies, and anti-modernist narratives. It further uncovers a platform-specific “soft extremism” adaptation mechanism: strategic identity reconfiguration—including racial depoliticization and inclusive rhetoric—to evade content moderation while advancing ideologically aligned norms. This is the first empirical demonstration of latent ideological permeation across aesthetic tags.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Responsible Web: Web for democratic and emancipatory futures

Abstract

In this work we collected and analyzed social media posts to investigate aesthetic-based radicalization where users searching for Cottagecore content may find Tradwife content co-opted by white supremacists, white nationalists, or other far-right extremist groups. Through quantitative analysis of over 200,000 Tumblr posts and qualitative coding of about 2,500 Tumblr posts, we did not find evidence of a 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 more likely it was an example of extremists re-branding their content and following platform norms to spread ideologies that would otherwise be rejected by Tumblr users. Additionally, 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 homesteading, all markers of reactionary ideals.

Problem

• Investigates aesthetic-based radicalization from Cottagecore to Tradwife content
• Examines overlap and mainstreaming between Tradwife and Cottagecore communities
• Analyzes temporal shift in Tradwife content focus pre- and post-2021

Innovation

• Analyzed 200,000 Tumblr posts quantitatively
• Qualitatively coded 2,500 Tumblr posts
• Conducted temporal analysis of tag usage