Digital visibility and the disciplining of motherhood: conditional legitimacy and spatial exclusion in East Asian public spaces

Across East Asia, pro-natalist state agendas coexist with the everyday exclusion of reproductive bodies from public space—a contradiction this article theorizes as the ‘digital micro-procreation penalty.” Drawing on feminist geography, mobility justice scholarship, and Ahmed’s account of sticky affect, it examines how platform-mediated visibility transforms public infrastructure into a disciplinary apparatus targeting maternal subjects. Through feminist critical discourse analysis of 19 high-engagement Xiaohongshu threads on high-speed rail childcare conflicts in China (46,943 comments), combined with survey and institutional materials on South Korea’s commercial child-exclusion zones, it identifies two structurally isomorphic yet institutionally distinct regimes of exclusion. Confucian familialism and neoliberal individualization jointly produce a hyper-intensive maternal accountability regime in which the ‘right to silence’ is recoded as a consumable spatial entitlement and children are rendered risks to order. Algorithmically amplified and archived, digital visibility compels mothers to perform continuous spatial self-management, rendering public occupancy conditional rather than guaranteed. The study extends mobility justice research beyond physical access, theorizing digitally mediated visibility itself as a mobility burden, and offers a new analytical apparatus for the spatial dimensions of the motherhood penalty in digitally intensive East Asia.