A Cold Take on Ballerina Farm (feat. James Baldwin)
Circling HomeWork #12
Everyone and their mother has written their thoughts about Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman in the weeks since this feature came out.
If you’re interested, you already know everything. But for the uninitiated, Hannah Neeleman is a Mormon woman who runs a livestock/lifestyle brand together with her husband and eight children, is also a pageant queen, and has nearly ten million social media followers. Before birthing this confusing empire, she once upon a time studied ballet at Juilliard. She has also, for the past year, been a major figure in the discourse around trad wives, social media influence, domestic performativity, and more. And so I opened the Times article skeptical, and left with my arms full of sadness.
Don't worry – I have almost nothing to say about Hannah Neeleman as regards her marriage (unappealing), her class (rich), her business (meat and home goods), her aesthetic (boring), her children (numerous), her faith (Mormon), beauty pageants as an institution (gross), or trad wives as a meme (fraught).
The only remotely interesting thing about her, to me, is the way her dreams deferred are actively part of the brand. While some of us brush our unfulfilled creative potential under the rug, for Hannah Neeleman, her whole brand is colored by the image of ballet. It’s her business name as well as her social media handle, where her bio includes “Juilliard ballerina” as well as “city folk turned ranchers.” Hannah, she desperately wants you to remember, is not like the other farm girls.