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This panel examines how visual culture constructs, mediates, and destabilizes political authority in the modern and contemporary eras. Building on W.J.T. Mitchell’s assertion that images are not inert reflections but active agents in political life, we invite papers that explore how leadership is staged, ritualized, and consumed across diverse media—from portraiture and propaganda to film, television, and social media.

We seek to interrogate how representations of political leaders and leadership negotiate the tensions between authenticity and performance, visibility and myth, across different regimes. Relevant questions include, but are not limited to:

How is authority constructed through bodily posture, gendered and racialized aesthetics, symbolic motifs, and staged settings for spectatorship? How are crises of faith, civil rights, and social justice, particularly under late capitalism, registered visually through the storytelling and image-making of leaders? How does visual culture sustain hegemonic ideals of gender and national identity, or, conversely, expose their instability?

Papers engaging cross-cultural, comparative, and transhistorical approaches are especially welcome. We are interested in both historical studies, such as revolutionary portraiture or the visual politics of personality cults, as well as contemporary critiques of mediated leadership within the society of the spectacle and the hyperreal performance of presidentiality.

Foregrounding the visual as a critical terrain where authority is not given but perpetually negotiated, this panel seeks to explore the visual strategies, cultural anxieties, and symbolic economies that define the face of power.