Guest Lecture by Dr. Sara Polak (Leiden University): “Intersectional Perspectives on Social Media Representations and the 2024 Presidential Race”

This lecture develops the notion of fetishized sight – the bad-faith decontextualization of images of marginalized people online – as introduced by Phillips and Milner (2021) and employs concepts and theories from play studies to analyze how Trump and his supporters have played with fetishized sight to demean minorities on Trump’s own social media platform Truth Social.