Gendered Performances of Populist Leadership: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Instagram Posts by Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni

This thesis examines how gendered performances are constructed in the Instagram communication of two right-wing populist leaders, Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni. While scholarship has widely explored populism and digital political communication, the gendered dimensions of leadership on visual social media platforms remain underexplored. Drawing on feminist theories of hegemonic masculinity, femonationalism, the politics of protection, and gender performativity, the study analyses how gendered traits contribute to the construction of political identity and populist leadership online. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), the thesis analyses Instagram posts published between 2017 and 2023, focusing on the interaction between visual, textual, and symbolic elements. Through a comparative approach, the study explores how Trump and Meloni perform different forms of gendered populist leadership while reinforcing nationalist and exclusionary narratives. The analysis shows that both leaders mobilise a coherent system of gendered discourses centred on the figure of the Protector, articulated through hypermasculinity in Trump’s entrepreneurial commander and through Meloni’s national motherhood, which fuses care for the family with care for the homeland. Through the interaction of images, captions, settings and symbols, the posts construct security, migration and national belonging as gendered narratives of protection, in which the defence of women and families is used to legitimise exclusionary and femonationalist political projects.