Sharing experience or selling service?: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of self-proclaimed Hong Kong female PhD student identity in Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)
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Zihan Xia
Abstract
This study employs a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to investigate the construction of hybrid identities by self-proclaimed female Hong Kong PhD students on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book). Analysing a collection of 40 posts from two prominent accounts, this paper examines how these individuals strategically blend semiotic resources to navigate the tensions between academic authenticity, postfeminist empowerment, and commercial promotion. The analysis identifies three core and interwoven identity categories: a professional sharing identity, which leverages institutional prestige and application expertise; a reflection sharing identity, which brokers gender stereotypes and promotes individual resilience; and a daily life sharing identity, which curates an idealised work-life equilibrium. It is argued that through the multimodal orchestration of these identities, using visual proof, empowering narratives, and synthetic personalisation, these posters naturalise their role as service promoters. This process effectively commodifies the academic persona, co-opting postfeminist discourses of choice and empowerment into a soft-selling strategy for educational consultancy. The findings illuminate a sophisticated mechanism of ideological manipulation within China’s platform economy, where resistant discourse is transformed into a marketable commodity, thereby contributing to critical understandings of the marketisation of higher education and the constraints on female empowerment in digital spaces.
Funding source: Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of Ministry of Education of China
Award Identifier / Grant number: 24YJC740024
Funding source: National Higher Education Teaching and Research Project
Award Identifier / Grant number: 202515046YN
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable time and insightful comments on earlier version of this paper. Their constructive feedback and expert suggestions were instrumental in significantly improving the quality and clarity of this manuscript. I would also like to express my thanks to Prof Dezheng (William) Feng in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University for his inspiring lectures, invaluable guidance and support throughout my MA programme.
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Research funding: This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of Ministry of Education of China (24YJC740024) and National Higher Education Teaching and Research Project (202515046YN).
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Use of inscribed objects in roleplay training sessions at a Japanese insurance company
- Visual and multimodal literacies in secondary education in Spain: voices from English language teachers
- The marketization of higher education in China: a comparative multimodal genre analysis between top-public and international universities
- Sustainability as an element of corporate identity: multimodal analysis of an Italian coffee company’s website
- Communicating political achievements: a semiotic analysis of political posters in the linguistic landscape of Tanzania
- From aspiring to authentic engineers: prioritizing real people and real problems in engineering through service design methodology
- Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality: a corpus analysis of motion events in global comics
- Sharing experience or selling service?: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of self-proclaimed Hong Kong female PhD student identity in Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)
- Professors’ perception of body language in the aftermath of the Covid-19 online teaching period
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Use of inscribed objects in roleplay training sessions at a Japanese insurance company
- Visual and multimodal literacies in secondary education in Spain: voices from English language teachers
- The marketization of higher education in China: a comparative multimodal genre analysis between top-public and international universities
- Sustainability as an element of corporate identity: multimodal analysis of an Italian coffee company’s website
- Communicating political achievements: a semiotic analysis of political posters in the linguistic landscape of Tanzania
- From aspiring to authentic engineers: prioritizing real people and real problems in engineering through service design methodology
- Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality: a corpus analysis of motion events in global comics
- Sharing experience or selling service?: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of self-proclaimed Hong Kong female PhD student identity in Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)
- Professors’ perception of body language in the aftermath of the Covid-19 online teaching period
