«If it's not Love then it's the Bomb». A social drama: selfie and nuclear imaginary in contemporary Politics

Abstract

This article aims to investigate some of the events that went through the presidency of Donald Trump until the surreal epilogue of the Capitol Hill assault and the declarations of Nancy Pelosi about preventing the outgoing president from initiating military hostilities, accessing launch codes and even ordering a nuclear attack. In order to investigate the nature of these events it will be useful to use the methodological filter of Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies and Jeffrey Alexander’s notion of social performance as a symbolic act of strategic nature. In this way it can be possible to see how the Capitol Hill assault and Pelosi's narrative intercepted and influenced the collective imaginary.