8 - Co-speech Gestures

Summary

The chapter explores co-speech gestures in spoken political discourse. It defines co-speech gesture as a fundamental feature of communication which is implicated in the discursive performance of prejudice. Gesture-speech relations are discussed and a classification of gestures is provided. It is shown how speech and gesture may interact with respect to schematisation, viewpoint, attention and metaphor. Two case studies focussed on the gestural style of right-wing populism are presented. The first considers the co-speech gestures executed by Donald Trump during a campaign rally. The analysis highlights his comedic use of gestures, the use of iconic and enactment gestures in connection with his border wall policy, and his use of points and shrugs to engage with his audience in different ways. The second focusses on co-speech gestures in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage. The analysis shows that legitimating moves characteristic of immigration discourse, including focussing, denial, authorisation, deixis, proximisation, metaphor, quantification and aspectising, when performed in spoken discourse are multimodal and involve a gestural component.