“Yesteryear and the Rise of Tradwife Fiction” captures this cultural moment by examining tradwifery and tradwife fiction through various critical lenses. Drawing from disability, BDSM, genre, and cultural studies, this panel’s focus on Burke’s novel expands scholarly purviews of contemporary fiction, gender, and digital culture through the subgenre of tradwife fiction. This panel features four presentations ranging from 13–15 minutes in duration. These parameters ensure at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion after presentations conclude, which will be moderated by Dr. Alex Anderson, the panel’s organizer.

In the first presentation, PhD candidate Violet Dong (New York University) argues that Yesteryear defines tradwife femininity as an ideal of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. Dong posits that Natalie Heller Mills’s tradwife influencer status depends on making bodily indebtedness disappear. Drawing on disability studies and crip theory, Dong examines how Natalie must perform endless domestic and reproductive work while remaining composed and visibly unexhausted. As the novel progresses, the consequences of this contradiction are mediated through Natalie’s increasingly unreliable narration, and her eventual psychic break exposes a genuine desire for relief from neoliberal demands.

Following Dong’s exploration of dis/ability in Yesteryear, Dr. Kathleen Vandenberg (Boston University) examines tradwife fiction’s popularity within the context of social media influencers who eschew the label “trad wife” while perpetuating the performative domesticity that defines the trend. Expanding the terrain of conventional motherhood from traditional public arenas such as playgrounds and parks to public digital spaces via social media, Dr. Vandenberg contends that these real women as well as their fictional avatars uphold and subvert the patriarchal adage, “The woman’s place is in the home.” Their position as tradwife influencers enables them to perform and profit from stereotypical acts of motherhood, including housekeeping, childcare, and marriage. In Yesteryear, however, Natalie is punished for this performance and effectively returned to the confines of traditional womanhood.

Nina Walker (University of Leicester) builds on Dr. Vandenberg’s analysis of tradwifery as public performance. While many critics insist that tradwifery requires an abdication of control, Walker reconsiders this assumption through the lens of kink, suggesting that those who masquerade as tradwives knowingly perpetuate this phenomenon for profit. Walker posits that most tradwives, like Burke’s Natalie Heller Mills, reproduce an image of submissive femininity that belies their control over that persona. Ultimately, Walker interprets the trad wife’s performance of submission as an act of agency.

To round out this panel, Dr. Dermot Ryan (Loyola Marymount University) emphasizes Yesteryear’s satirical engagement with survivalism, an increasingly ubiquitous discourse in American culture. Survivalism casts rural settings as sites of self-reliance; a libertarian suspicion of those outside kinship units; and a gender politics in which survival requires restoring the nuclear family's traditional gender hierarchy. Dr. Ryan examines Yesteryear’s temporal structure as a critique of tradwifery’s bad faith relationship to time and technology. In Yesteryear, future and past collapse; the future becomes a mythic past, and the present becomes a cosplay interval preoccupied with accumulation rather than lived experience.

Upholding the Modern Language Association’s commitments to equity and inclusion, this panel brings together individuals from myriad academic backgrounds. Two presenters (Dong and Walker) are emerging scholars dissertating on American literature and culture. Presenting at the MLA convention remains a rite of passage for humanities graduate students as well as an important networking and professional development opportunity. The other two presenters (Drs. Vandenberg and Ryan) are established scholar-teachers who have contributed numerous publications that cover key issues in literary history and cultural studies. Additionally, this panel has been organized and will be presided over by an early-career tenure-track professor (Dr. Anderson). Alongside emerging scholars, participating in this venue keeps more established scholars abreast of new research and will likely lead to mentoring opportunities that grow our field.