ABSTRACT
Increasing cultural diversity and norms of social equality in liberal democratic nations have made the emergence of national leaders from minority backgrounds, such as Barack Obama in the United States and Julia Gillard in Australia, more likely. Such leaders not only face special challenges in mobilising widespread social identification and political support from the wider polity, they also make salient how minorities must manage and negotiate their marginalised identities in everyday social life. Indeed the elevation of Obama and Gillard to positions of political leadership was associated with widespread debates in their respective nations about race and identity in America and gender and sexism in Australia. These public debates were not limited to formal institutional settings but also proliferated into everyday life where issues such as racial and gender inequality became salient concerns for ordinary people. Using a discursive psychological approach (Potter, 1996; Potter & Edwards, 2001), this chapter examines how the first African American president of the United States and the first female prime minister of Australia attended to their minority group memberships in their political discourse and discursively managed the categories of race and gender, respectively, when they emerged as contested topics in public debate. In conclusion, we discuss the potential such leaders with minority identities have in generating more complex and inclusive categories of national and civic identification in order to reflect the reality of increasing social diversity and for the purposes of social change.
