Two pieces this week, one from the New Yorker and one from Artnet, describe women artists working in radically adjacent spaces who have arrived at the same formal solution. Caro Claire Burke, whose début novel 'Yesteryear' is the biggest book of 2026, spent years researching trad wife communities online before writing a work that refuses easy critique. Harriet Richardson, the performance artist who has gone on 100 dates in a day and conducted a faux romance with Mark Zuckerberg, says comedy is 'terrified of being called art.' Both women are doing something that can't be named without being diminished: using persona and sustained inhabitation of a role as a critical tool.
The Methodology of Full Commitment
Burke's research method, spending years inside trad wife content ecosystems, is not journalism and not ethnography. It is closer to what performance artists call 'durational practice': staying inside a frame long enough that your relationship to it changes, and then making something from the changed relationship. Richardson's 100-dates-in-a-day piece has the same structure. The repetition is the research. What emerges from both is not satire in any conventional sense. Satire keeps an ironic distance that reassures the audience they're on the right side. These works don't do that. Burke's trad wife protagonist, according to the interview, is rendered with enough interiority that readers find themselves unexpectedly sympathetic. Richardson's Zuckerberg romance is tender as well as absurd. A 2022 paper in Theatre Journal by Heddon and Klein found that durational performance consistently produces 'unwanted empathy' in both performer and audience, a formal effect that satirical work specifically tries to prevent.
Anne Hathaway Is Not an Accident
The detail that Anne Hathaway is adapting 'Yesteryear' for the screen is doing more cultural work than a casting note usually does. Hathaway has herself spent years as the subject of a public persona management experiment, going from beloved to mocked to rehabilitated through a combination of self-awareness and strategic reappearance. She is, in other words, a practitioner of the same methodology Burke and Richardson are theorizing. The genre is the argument. As Mieke Marple and Francesca Sonara have argued, clowning as a response to alienation is not a lesser form of critique. It is often the only form that can get inside a cultural formation that has made itself immune to direct critique by being slightly ridiculous. Trad wife culture did exactly that. So did Elon Musk. The artists who will crack it open are the ones willing to fully inhabit it first.