<![CDATA[Women's representation in Indonesian political leadership remains far below the mandated 30% affirmative quota, making the emergence of female regional leaders a significant phenomenon worth examining. This study investigates how Sherly Tjoanda, Governor of North Maluku, constructs her political branding as a woman through TikTok content on the account @sherlytjoanda. The central question addressed is: how is Sherly Tjoanda's political branding as a woman constructed through TikTok? This research employs a qualitative descriptive approach using qualitative content analysis as its method. The corpus consists of 70 videos published between January and March 2026, analyzed through a layered coding framework based on Carprara et al.'s political branding personality, encompassing seven dimensions: sincerity leads to agreeableness, competence and energy, excitement, openness, sophistication, ruggedness, and consociation. Gender communication patterns were analyzed using Grebelsky-Lichtman's Mixed Communication Model (2017), which distinguishes masculine and feminine verbal and nonverbal communication. Findings reveal that the Competence and Energy dimension is the most dominant across the corpus, followed by Consociation and Sincerity Leads to Agreeableness, while Sophistication and Ruggedness appear minimally. In terms of gender communication patterns, feminine verbal combined with feminine nonverbal communication dominates the entire corpus, diverging from Grebelsky-Lichtman's model which predicts masculine verbal paired with feminine nonverbal as the typical pattern for senior female politicians. This divergence is attributed to TikTok's informal character, which privileges authenticity and emotional closeness over formal authority. The study concludes that Sherly's political branding positions femininity not as a liability but as a deliberate and effective communication strategy in digital political spaces.]]>
