Gender and academia intertwined: identity construction of Chinese female PhD students on social media

Social media offers Chinese female PhD students unprecedented opportunities for self-presentation and identity negotiation, yet internal perspectives on their identity construction remain understudied. This study employs multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to investigate how Chinese female PhD students use linguistic and visual resources on Xiaohongshu (Rednote), a female-dominated social media platform, to construct their identities. The analysis identifies three interrelated dimensions of identity: (1) the individual self, which foregrounds diligence, self-discipline, and self-affirmation, re-signifying appearance management, consumption, and leisure as legitimate enactments of self-care and agency; (2) the role-based self, which oscillates between vulnerability and competence, transforming doctoral stress and uncertainty into shared narratives of resilience and professional achievement; and (3) the sociocultural self, which interrogates gender norms, age- and marriage-related expectations, and structural bias in academia through metaphor, evaluative language, and collective imagery, articulating aspirations for recognition and change. Embedded within and responsive to Confucian gender norms, neoliberal ideology, postfeminist discourse, platform capitalism, and academic institutional structures, these identity practices reflect strategic negotiations between mobility and social change. This study advances understanding of how Chinese female PhD students assert agency and negotiate identities online, contributing to scholarship on gender, higher education, and digital culture in contemporary China.