The Language of Advocacy in the US Women’s Caucus: A Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

This study provides a stylistic examination of advocacy speech within the U.S. Women’s Caucus, concentrating on the role of linguistic choices in advancing women’s rights and contesting gender-based disparities in political settings. Utilizing Leech and Short’s (2007) stylistic approach, the study analyzes specific excerpts from a Beijing +30 Shadow Report generated by the U.S. Women’s Caucus. The approach emphasizes the various types and functions of advocacy, specifically structural, evidence-based, evaluative, and policy-oriented advocacy, and examines their manifestation through vocabulary choice, grammatical structure, rhetorical techniques, and contextual framing. The results indicate that advocacy discourse is marked by the deliberate employment of evaluative lexis, abstraction, modality, enumeration, and statistical evidence to establish legitimacy, allocate responsibility, and stimulate institutional action. The research illustrates that stylistic choices are not neutral; rather, they are ideologically driven, serving as persuasive instruments that construct gendered identities and reveal structural inequities. This study emphasizes the significance of stylistics in elucidating the role of language as a potent tool in feminist political discourse, by employing a stringent stylistic framework to political advocacy texts.