Taking a stance through stance: the forms and functions of shrugs in the spoken discourse of Donald Trump

Abstract

The communicative style of right-wing populism is characterized by embodied modes of performance as much as verbal stylistic features. This article investigates the embodied performance of one right-wing populist politician, namely Donald Trump, with a focus on one specific kinesic routine: the shrug. While the body’s role in right-wing populist communication is increasingly recognized, it is rarely approached through the kind of systematic analysis afforded by gesture studies within cognitive linguistics. This article takes a multimodal discourse-analytical approach, drawing on gesture studies within cognitive linguistics, to offer a detailed description and critical interpretation of the forms and functions of Donald Trump’s shrugging gestures. The analysis shows how Trump’s shrugs contribute to the kind of ‘corporeal presence’ typically observed of right-wing populist politicians. It further shows the range of evaluative meanings that Trump expresses through shrugs and the ideological functions that such stance-taking acts perform within the context of right-wing populism. In doing so, the article further advances a programme for gestural research in multimodal critical discourse analysis.