Abstract: Synecdochal Representation and The Populist Body: Performances of Gender and Ethnicity in Populist and Non-Populist Presidents

There has recently been an upsurge in interest around the notion of populist political leadership defined as a certain type of performative self-presentation that emphasize toughness and machismo (Ostiguy 2014, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2015, Moffitt 2015, Toygar 2016, Mazzoleni 2019.) These pieces perform an important role in casting light on issues that the literature on populism has often overlooked: the ways in which socio-cultural matrixes of meaning are transformed into political power or the ways in which personal performance becomes a mediation in the process of political representation. This paper shares these claims yet at the same time it expects to add to these them by pointing to three overlooked issued. First, it wants to move from the fixation with the characteristics of the leader to an approach that focuses on the followers. Second, it wants to posit that the power of populist performance is rooted in the fact that the followers believe that the very persona of the leader embodies their own identity not in an ideational but in a concrete, physical, synecdochal way. By being elected into a space of power that has been out of limits so far, the leaders body carries with it the presence of her followers in a transgressive manner and thus becomes their populist redeemer (Casullo 2019). Third, and finally, it will argue that more than one way exists to perform the populist bodily transgression. The literature has focused on the macho swagger of Carlos Menem or Silvio Berlusconi, but there are other ways make present the followers’ bodies in ways that go against ‘normal’ politics. This paper will discuss on the way in which six former South American presidents (Evo Morales, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Michelle Bachelet, Rafael Correa, Alejandro Toledo, Néstor Kirchner) have negotiated their own embodied performances dealing with gender and ethnicity.