The diapered Donald
Comic infantilizations of a U.S. American president
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9237441 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher J Gilbert (English, Assumption University, Worcester, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 107 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 328-353 |
| Publication date | 2021-07-03 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Quarterly Journal of Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0033-5630 • E-ISSN: 1479-5779 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00335630.2021.1945132 |
| OpenAlex | W3180603511 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
The Trump-as-Infant trope is legion. This essay engages how infantilization constitutes comic diminution by dampening the magnitude of Donald J. Trump’s presidency and blunting its rhetorical force via mockery and contempt. It does so by recasting an understanding of the rhetorical presidency through the lens of Trump’s cartoon presidentialism. This essay conceptualizes reductio ad bairn, or the comic reduction to the infantile, as a particularly potent mode of capturing perversions in the Big Other of presidentialism and disavowals among a body politic that is stuck in a childish cycle of folding perceived oppressions and resentments into political fantasies. The concept of reductio ad bairn, which builds on Sigmund Freud’s sense of the comicality in degradation (and, indeed, the degradations in comicality) and Jacques Lacan’s sense of perversion, demonstrates how the specific trope of Baby Trump stands out as an exemplar of comic infantilization. Moreover, it magnifies the failures of using caricature in a manner that does little to demystify the petty tyrannies of an abject rhetorical presidency. This essay concludes with a critical reflection on the risks of overdoing these sorts of diminutions to the effect of diminishing the possibilities of rhetorical imagination in comic judgment
Aesthetics · Art · Comics · Contempt · Literature · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Psychoanalysis · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Trope (literature) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |