Wounded mothers, platformed pain: Victimized motherhood in China’s platformed creator economy

This article examines how mom creators on Xiaohongshu articulate maternal pain and reproductive suffering as a form of digital victimhood. I conceptualize these articulations as victimized motherhood, a platform-mediated mode of maternal subjectivity that operates at the intersection of political critique, platform governance, and creator economy. Victimized motherhood unfolds through three processes: politicizing pain, by framing maternal suffering as structural injustice; branding pain, by converting vulnerability into marketable personas and branding strategies; and platformizing pain, by translating embodied experiences into visually and emotionally resonant content aligned with platform visibility regimes. Rather than constituting a fixed political stance, victimized motherhood emerges as a contingent and constrained political expression shaped by state censorship, affective labor, and platform governance within China’s tightly regulated digital environment. This article extends digital motherhood scholarship and contributes to broader debates on the politics of victimhood and platform-mediated resistance in authoritarian contexts.