The Body of Political Representatives and the Two Mechanisms of Political Representation

The physical bodies of representatives are involved in multiple symbolic processes that contribute to the way we conceive, think about, and imagine democracy. In democracy, the representation of political institutions is embedded in a neutral frame capable to symbolize the people as a whole. Symbolic representation of political institutions requires neutrality to be performed by the representatives and by their bodies. Yet, at the same time, it is impossible to dissociate particular characteristics of the body, which contribute to construct gender, class or race identity, from political representatives’ performances. There is an intrinsic contradiction between the neutralization of the physical body in the representation of institutions and the identification with representatives’ physical appearance connected to identification with and descriptive representation of minority groups. The paper will focus on these two processes and explore the tension between them by examining the performances of political leaders such as Barack Obama and Angela Merkel.