Populism, Persona and Performance: Queer Understandings of Left-Wing Populist Discourses and Audience-Informed Reciprocal Performance Online

Understandings of populism have become encumbered by a terminological anarchy, and a reliance upon normatively applied definitions. Such developments have rendered research into populism insensitive to
the political, media, and cultural settings in which contemporary populists operate.
This paper will seek to provide new insights into populism, specifically into populist discourses as they manifest in the digital public sphere, while also elaborating queered insights into populist discourses as part of an audience informed reciprocal performance online.
Such a digital public sphere in which populists assemble online exists linked to, but discrete from, the physical realm. It is governed by its own rules, norms, and iterations of a social contract in operation between participants online, creating new structures of authority and exchange. This paper will seek to explore how politics, social media, and culture interact in order to generate discourses online, maintained by concepts of mutual responsibility and consent. Gradually, concepts of populism, persona, and performance emergence.
Through a six-month digital ethnography, followed by in-depth semi-structured interviews across Britain, France, and Germany, this paper coproduces novel and impactful insights into populism. The phased
process of the research produces narrative order for the assessment of contemporary politics and communication, allowing for queered insights into the dynamics and mechanisms of populism online within Western Europe. Queered social constructionist approaches democratise the process of
knowledge generation and offer understandings of populism new lenses to focus on the competing structures of power and conflicting realities live within the online arena.
Through a reflexive thematic analysis of the generated data, the process produces a rich and impact insight into populism as not an ideology, strategy or style, but instead as a complicated, organic, and consistently evolving system of communications, involving both author and audience in a reciprocal arrangement. Both the politician and their public become vital interlocutors, as they begin to produce new norms and expectations which bind their communications in response to changing discourses.
Terminological chaos, as elaborated by previous research, become practical chaos, as individuals seek to engage within the communicative game to emerge triumphant. Populism, personas, and performance interact, and the cycle of communication persists. This, it is argued, should be of prime academic concern.