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Stigmatizing Portrayals of Former President Donald Trump in Arabic Political Cartoons: A Visual Framing of Trump’s Decision to Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and his Middle East Peace Plan
Abstract by Dr. Sadam Issa On Session I-28  (Culture and Nationalism)

On Thursday, November 2 at 3:00 pm

2023 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This study examines how Arabic political cartoons depict former US President Donald Trump in relation to his decision to move the US Embassy from Israel to Jerusalem in 2018 as well as to his peace plan in the Middle East known as “The Deal of the Century.” In particular, the study investigates the visually stigmatizing portrayals of Trump used to depict him with regard to these decisions. The study uses the Framing Theory (Entman, 1993) and theoretical concept of “hostile imagination” (Keen, 1986: 13) to examine how the negative stereotypes of overweight provoke the antagonistic categorization of Trump as the “Other.” I argue that the Arabic political cartoons use fat body and other body distortions of Trump as visualization to delegitimize his political decisions. These fat and bodily distortion of Trump result from the deep stigmatizations of fatness and these bodily distortion in the Arabic culture. The political cartoons selected for this study were retrieved from Facebook and represent the work of different Arab cartoonists who featured Trump's political decision. A content analysis was conducted to examine images pertaining to obesity, and other physiological characteristics used in depicting Trump as a malefactor. For this purpose, I implemented a coding tool (Heuer et al., 2011) to identify and determine obese and corpulent characteristics using the following criteria: “. . . 6. Body weight. 7. How the body was portrayed in the image. 8. Whether the head was cut out of the image . . . 10. Clothing style (professional, casual, or exercise) 11. Fit of clothes (appropriate or inappropriate; coded as inappropriate only if an obese individual’s clothing was distinctly too tight)” (979). Findings indicate that the surveyed cartoons used different satirical depictions including depicting Trump as an obese, non-human, murderous and savage aggressor to stigmatize and ridicule him and hence serve as an archetype, an “archetype of the enemy” (Hyde & McGuinness, 1994, p. 86), that grants Trump the status of a hostile “other.” References: Entman R M (1993) Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication (43): 51–58. Heuer CA, McClure KJ, & Puhl RM (2011) Obesity Stigma in Online News: A Visual Content Analysis. Journal of Health Communication 16(9): 976–987. Hyde M, & McGuinness M (1994) Introducing Jung. New York: Totem Books. Keen, S. (1986) Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. First edition. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None