The wounded leader: the illness narratives of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump

Jones, R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9426-727X (2021) The wounded leader: the illness narratives of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Discourse, Context & Media, 41. 100499. ISSN 2211-6958 doi: 10.1016/j.dcm.2021.100499

Abstract/Summary

This paper analyses the COVID-19 narratives of US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, combining principles from applied linguistic approaches to illness narratives and sociolinguistic approaches to language and gender. It focuses specifically on the ways Johnson and Trump structured their stories to portray themselves as certain kinds of ‘characters’, the ways they discursively constructed agency in their narratives, and the ways they engaged in various practices of stance-taking. The analysis reveals that, although Johnson and Trump seemed to have taken very different lessons from their illnesses, the subtext of both their narratives promoted a masculinist discourse designed to depict them as ‘strong leaders’ and to detract attention from discussions of their reckless personal behaviour leading up to their infections and the failures of their governments to formulate coherent plans to control the pandemic. Keywords: affect, agency, illness narratives, masculinity, stance

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/97519
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.dcm.2021.100499
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Publisher	Elsevier
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item