Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

Identity Construction on Social Media: Chinese American Women City Supervisors' Political Performance of Ethnicity and Gender in Sanfrancisco

Weihan ChenBeijing Foreign Studies University*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

This study interrogates how Chinese American women city supervisors discursively construct ethnic and gendered identities through their Facebook political communication. Drawing on a sociocultural linguistic approach to identity, the study conducts a discursive analysis of 370 posts published by two supervisors on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors between November 2024 and January 2026, aiming to elucidate the mechanisms through which discursive narratives fashion identity and what sociocultural factors make them possible. Two correlated political identities are coded: the context-sensitive ethnic navigator, who strategically shifts among Chinese-specific, pan-ethnic, and ethnically neutral registers depending on issue context, and the care-oriented female leader, who constructs governance legitimacy predominantly through covert care discourse, supplemented at particular symbolic moments by overt celebration of female role models. To account for the amalgamation of these two identities, this study proposes an overarching identity assemblage—the compassionate guardian—that transforms ethnic visibility work and gendered governance into a distinctive form of political authority, sustained through Facebook's media affordances. The findings illuminate how Chinese American women negotiate the intersecting constraints of racialized and gendered political expectations at the local level, advancing scholarship on minority women's political communication in municipal politics.

Keywords: Chinese American women; identity construction; political performance; gender; ethnicity
Published: May 25, 2026
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2026.33859
Volume: CHR Vol.111
pp. 15-27
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