Affective authority, gender, and platformed communication: female police representation in Chinese short-video environments

As short-video platforms become central to digital governance, authority is increasingly communicated through affective and interpersonal practices rather than institutional discourse alone. This study examines how female police officers are positioned in Chinese official police short videos and how gendered affect functions as a mechanism through which authority becomes emotionally legible and socially approachable. Drawing on affect theory, feminist scholarship, and multimodal discourse analysis, the study analyzes 167 videos (2020–2025) using ELAN-based annotation to trace recurring visual, embodied, and interactional cues. The analysis conceptualizes authority as a relational communicative process shaped by platformed visibility, repetition, and algorithmic circulation. It shows that female officers are recurrently mobilized as affective intermediaries whose performances of care, humor, and patience translate institutional power into culturally familiar forms, while also exposing gendered tensions in state-mediated visibility. The article contributes to research on platform governance by foregrounding affect, gendered labor, and multimodal mediation as mechanisms of contemporary authority.