SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Charlotte Bruce Kells

Anna Friedlander
Hormones and data in the digital menstrual tracking entanglement
An agential realist analysis of apps and menstruating bodies

Period tracking apps - digital applications that people use to track their menstrual cycles - are among the top-downloaded apps by adult and adolescent women in health categories, with hundreds of millions of downloads worldwide. There is a growing body of international sociological research into digital menstrual and fertility tracking, but with a few notable exceptions (Hohmann-Marriott; Riley), there is little sociological work into menstrual and fertility tracking in Aotearoa.
Within this context I perform an agential realist investigation of the sociotechnical entanglement of apps, app users, tracking practices, app development, gender, and bodies in Aotearoa, with a particular focus on the emergence of two phenomena – hormones and data. How are hormones and data enacted in, with and through tracking apps, and what are the implications? What role does power play, and how do the various elements of the menstrual tracking entanglement shape each other? In this presentation I present early results from my research into digital menstrual tracking entanglements in Aotearoa.


Yunyi Zhang
Shaping Mothering Ideas: How 1.5 and 2nd-Generation Chinese New Zealand Mothers Engage with Chinese and Western Discourses

Despite the significant presence of Chinese migrant families in countries like New Zealand, the experiences of 1.5 and 2nd-generation Chinese New Zealand mothers remain underexplored. Situated between their Chinese heritage and New Zealand’s sociocultural context, these mothers encounter diverse and sometimes conflicting discourses on motherhood and gender norms. This paper delves into the mothering ideas, perceptions, and expectations shaping 1.5 and 2nd-generation Chinese New Zealand mothers who navigate a complex interplay of Chinese and Western cultural norms, values, and institutional structures.

Drawing on John Gillis’s concepts of ‘the families we live by’ and ‘the families we live with,’ the paper unpacks how these mothers interpret and position themselves within diverse motherhood ideals or discourses. The analysis also considers the impact of broader cultural expectations, family dynamics, and educational values within the Chinese New Zealand community. By teasing out the layered discourses of what it means to be a Chinese New Zealand mother, this paper illuminates how these mothers traverse the nuanced cultural spectrum and engage with diverse ideas to shape their maternal beliefs in a culturally diverse society.

This research contributes to the Gender and Sexuality stream, shedding light on the cultural negotiation processes of immigrant mothers in a multicultural society.

Chair: Fairleigh GIlmour

Peyton Bond
Social reproduction, abolition, and the family

This paper adds to feminist demands to centre social transformation on the epistemological foundation and practice of abolition. I focus in this paper on the feminist call for abolition of the family. Drawing from feminist demands from the 1970s and the present, this paper grounds itself in social reproduction theory and abolitionist feminism to centre the family as a key site of labour exploitation, gender-making, and the settler colonial project. The urgency of this moment, in which sociopolitical rhetoric draws on panics of a declining white nuclear family to produce intensified border control, law enforcement, and welfare degradation, requires a reinvigoration of the ‘most infamous feminist proposal’: abolish the family. Despite the feminist family abolitionism of the 1970s, the next decades witnessed a feminist walk-back and a move instead towards family reform. This paper examines the political, legal, and social borders of the nuclear family from a feminist abolitionist perspective alongside insights from social reproduction theory. Drawing from key feminist texts since the 1970s, alongside more recent iterations of family abolition arguments (such as Lewis 2022, O’Brien 2020, Weeks 2023, and Lethabo King 2018), this paper outlines the nuclear family as not only a significant form of enclosure, atomisation, and exclusion, but further as a site from which we may (re)examine radical forms of collective and anti-capitalist care – even if, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore articulates, we must change everything.


Spark Vulpa (Sang Myung Park)
Get the Credit You Deserve: the Evolution of ‘Deserving’ Parents through Aotearoa New Zealand’s Family Policies

Parents shape children's futures, making them both perpetuators and potential remedies to generational problems. However, how are the parents shaped though government policies?

This research examines the ways family policy has shaped understandings of ‘deserving’ parents in Aotearoa New Zealand over time, focusing on the advent of ‘Working for Families’. The ‘Working for Families’ package is an integral income assistance scheme that was introduced as part of Budget 2004, and its aims have been to mitigate child poverty, as well as incentivise workforce participation for parents.

Previous scholarship addressed the history and socio-political impacts of ‘Working for Families’ on Aotearoa families, exploring who was included and excluded from its accompanying benefits. However, no one has examined how family policies impacted parents’ understandings of ‘deservingness’. To address the gap, this project analyses how the construction of ‘Working for Families’ and its associated meanings have framed (or privileged) parents who adhere to specific policy aims. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ framework, this research utilises sociological, political and historical studies on the progression of family policies in Aotearoa to trace the evolution and construction of ‘deserving’ families, and identify the extent to which the neoliberal state has been able to maintain agenda-oriented definitions.


Charlotte Bruce Kells
Becoming a Mother: First-time mothers navigating pregnancy, birth & postpartum in Aotearoa New Zealand

Since second-wave feminism, becoming a mother has been singled out as the key site of women's oppression by many key feminist thinkers. In 1976, Adrianne Rich wrote in Of Women Born that “the words are being spoken now, are being written down; the taboos are being broken, the masks of motherhood are cracking through”. Almost 40 years on, it’s hard not to feel despondent about how much of the mask of motherhood remains intact for parents in 2025. This paper explores 10 first-time mothers' experiences of becoming mothers using serial interviews to follow the participants through their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. The data from the 30 interviews identified 3 key themes: The constructed experience of becoming a mother; the structural experience of becoming a mother; and the subjective experience of
becoming a mother. By understanding these three key experiences of new motherhood, this research aims to provide a better understanding of how to address motherhood as a key site of women’s oppression through a feminist lens.