Populist Leaders And Masculinity: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Of Hegemonic Masculinity Performances On Social Media

This work is a multimodal critical discourse analysis of masculinity performance on social media. Specifically, we aim to analyse with a multimodal qualitative approach how populist leaders, Donald J. Trump, Matteo Salvini, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen and Boris Johnson, perform masculinity traits through visual and textual discourse practices on Twitter and Instagram. The results of the investigation show that these right-wing populist leaders perform – from a multimodal perspective – masculinity in a similar way despite the different cultural contexts in which they are reproduced.