Satirical conformity
Plus trad make-believe, the remaking of a life, and the earrings I wear with everything
How was your weekend? I soccer-mommed in a not-quite-hurricane, celebrated a friend’s birthday, and transplanted a bunch of milkweed from the garden bed it has spent all summer invading to a field where it can roam free.
I’ve been thinking a lot about accounts like this one lately. At first glance, it seems like typical aspirational trad content, right? But as indicated from some of her responses to commenters and this interview with
, Alexia Delarosa is clearly making deliberate decisions about her maternal performance, and maybe attempting . . . meta-commentary?
After watching and rewatching several of her reels, I think Delarosa is both creating aspirational content and also poking fun at aspirational content. Like, she seems fully aware that baking with two small children while wearing white lace frocks and an uncannily blissed out facial expression is a fantasy. But she’s also selling that fantasy? It reminds me a little of when Disney tries to win feminism points by inserting self-aware nods to their past (toxic) representations of femininity.
I’m thinking of the scene in Wreck it Ralph where Vanellope meets a squad of Disney princesses who (to determine whether or not Vanellope is a real princess), ask her a series of questions meant to show that Disney totally understands how undeveloped their prior female protagonists were. We’re in on the joke, Disney seems to be saying, by highlighting how their more vintage Disney princesses were characterized mainly through a sexist understanding of womanhood and patriarchal values.