The discursive realisation of a progressive congresswoman: Stancetaking across contexts and media

This paper aims to provide novel insights into contemporary political identities and discourse with a study of the stancetaking moves and discursive strategies that American freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez employed in her first term to impute stances of alignment and disalignment across contexts and media. It adopts a critical discourse analytical approach to examine Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s stancetaking trajectory and, specifically, the features that characterise the stance dimensions, reframing practices, and self- and other-positioning strategies in selected responses that she articulated within the tweets she posted and the remarks she delivered before the US House of Representatives in reaction to attacks perpetrated by the media and her political opponents against her and her political platform. The results of this investigation do not only unveil the nature of Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s stancetaking moves to align with ‘the people’ and disalign with the opposition in different situations and for different audiences but it also unearths the strategies and practices that she has deployed in the attempt to maintain her authenticity and legitimacy, to safeguard the coherence of her personal narrative and political self, and to situate herself within a larger national and historical storyline.