Gastropopulism: a sociosemiotic analysis of politicians posingas “the everyday man” via food posts on social media.

Resumo (EN)

Scholars have highlighted the bond between contemporary right-wing populism and social media. They have also shown howpopulist features such as anti-elitism, nationalism and people-centrism are manifested through the exhibition of the leaders’private lives and everyday habits on social media. This papercontributes to this scholarship by looking at how two of theseleaders – Matteo Salvini and Jair Bolsonaro – use one everydayfeature of life on their social media accounts: food. Combiningdiscursive semiotics and multimodal critical discourse analysis, Iinvestigate how Salvini and Bolsonaro’s food posts uphold theirimage of right-wing populist leaders. I argue that food images allowthem to strategically communicate features such as being close tothe common people, nationalism and the “us versus them” rhetoric,humbleness and authenticity. I also claim that these values are builtboth by the food represented in the images and their framing,lights, colours, shapes and textures, which allude to the amateuraesthetic of everyday social media use. As much as other features ofthe everyday social media use, food posts appear to be anideological tool through which right-wing populism iscommunicated as a soft, safe and worthwhile political ideology.