ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the role of transgressive populist performances centered on the body of the leader. It makes three contributions to the study of how the leader’s performative self-presentation becomes a form of mediation in processes of populist representation. First, it aims to move from a fixation on the characteristics of the leader to an approach that focuses on the followers. Second, it posits 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, almost synecdochal way. Third, and finally, the chapter illustrates that there clearly is more than one way to perform this populist bodily transgression. To explore populist and non-populist bodily representation, seven examples, all taken from South America, are examined: those of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, as well as Michelle Bachelet and Alejandro Toledo, in Chile and Peru respectively, on the non-populist side.
