Soaking in Common Sense: How LDS Tradwife Influencers Make Patriarchy Feel Natural, Beautiful, and Chosen

This paper examines how LDS tradwife influencer discourse produces gendered “common sense” on Instagram and how that common sense functions hegemonically to normalize patriarchal domesticity. Drawing on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the organic intellectual, an adapted use of Herman and Chomsky’s manufacturing consent model, and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis, the project analyzes a corpus of twenty public Instagram posts from four creators: Hannah Neeleman, Nara Smith, Corrine Stokoe, and The Food Nanny. The corpus was collected from posts published between December 31, 2025, and April 1, 2026, and analyzed by text, discourse practice, and social practice.