Aesthetic Animals: The Self-Presentation of Trudeau, Trump, and Macron on Instagram

Digital mediums like Instagram have reduced the importance of media gate-keepers for the self-presentation of political figures, reshaping the the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of the political. These transformations upend stable categories of aesthetic representation to consecrate new and desirable ways of viewing political figures—often finding resonance in popular culture. The sociology of culture brings valuable tools to questions of consecration of political imagery through these new mediums: how have politicians reshaped the aesthetic dimensions of their self-presentations and rituals through online mediums like Instagram? and to what effect? This paper is a comparative and systematic analysis of the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of the photographic representations of Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron on their Instagram accounts across their political careers. Each image was coded according to the interaction rituals present in the interaction according to Goffman’s scheme developed in Gender in Advertisement (1979). While Macron and Trump are exalted in their representations, in accord with Goffman’s thesis that white males are depicted as ritually superior in photographic displays to people of colour and women, Trudeau is depicted as ritually subordinated to women, Indigenous peoples, and peoples of colour—subverting the ritual order to symbolic effect. Moreover, while Trump’s representation have maintained the same ritual order across his political career, Trudeau and Macron seem to adjust the ritual order of their interaction chains to fit their political contexts and policy desires. Such changing self-presentations point to a highly aesthetic sensibility for Trudeau and Macron. These aesthetic self-presentations create and reinforce a type of social imaginary in popular culture that sustains and reinforces a misrecognition of stratification in the social order, absorbing the contradictions of both symbolic and material inequality.