My Mama Says: Feminist Approaches to Addressing Mother-Daughter Relationships with Asian Migrant Women through Digital Platforms in Aotearoa New Zealand
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Yeung, Helen
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Matelau, Tui
Batistich-Vogels, Christina
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Auckland University of Technology
Abstract
This thesis investigates feminist approaches to addressing mother-daughter relationships with Asian migrant women in Aotearoa New Zealand through digital platforms. Utilising a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) framework, this research project examines how creating various forms of digital or analogue media allows participants to engage with their Asian migrant mother-daughter relationships. The participants' demographics comprise of daughters in the age range of 20 to 35 and their mothers, who self-identify as Asian migrant women residing in Aotearoa New Zealand. Participants were asked to respond to the prompts, and with the option of sharing their media on digital platforms and exploring a range of formats, including visual, audio, video, and textual content. They also documented their experiences through reflective journal entries after the completion of each prompt. Using FPAR and Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis (MIA), this study conducts an explorative analysis of the selected digital platforms (Instagram and TikTok) and the media generated by each mother-daughter pair, examining the affordances, engagement, and impact these platforms facilitate. Affordances, in this instance, refer to the properties of social media that emerge from the technological, social, and contextual relationships that enable and constrain specific uses of the platforms.
This study highlights a knowledge gap in Asian migrant women’s stories, voices, and experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly in mother-daughter relationships, which are often neglected in social science research and broader mainstream perspectives. Over the past two decades, despite a rise in studies characterising Asian migrant women’s roles as mothers or daughters, their narratives continue to be marginalised or misrepresented. These studies often depict them as most vulnerable to acculturation stress and identity issues resulting from cultural conflicts, intergenerational tensions, and discrimination. Their experiences are frequently framed through the lens of oppression, trauma, or violence, with a fixation on roles such as Tiger mothers, dutiful daughters, caregivers, English learners, workers, or housewives. These forms of representation fail to recognise, let alone create, spaces for agency, dissent, or more nuanced representations of their lived experiences. The significance of this research comes in threefold: expanding on ways of providing an agentive platform for storytelling and self-representation of Asian migrant mother-daughters; contributing to Motherhood Studies by including Asian migrant mother-daughter relationships; and advancing Feminist Communication Studies by developing new ways to amplify the voices of Asian migrant women.
Data for this research project were collected using the MIA framework. The data pieces created by the mother-daughter participants were organised and analysed through phases I, II, and III of MIA, which are presented in the thesis through data collection tables and data set tables. In Chapters 4 and 5, I showcase my data and how the MIA framework contributed to a more nuanced understanding of Asian migrant mother-daughter relationships through the collective modalities enabled by feminist prompts, art-making, and digital platforms.
This research project confirms three key findings. First, digital platforms can facilitate feminist approaches to storytelling and self-representation for Asian migrant mother-daughter pairs in Aotearoa New Zealand by offering accessible, creative, and collaborative spaces for inquiry, identity exploration, and dialogue. Second, non-traditional feminist research methods, such as those employed in this study, seek to challenge and reject stereotypes of Asian migrant mother-daughter relationships by focusing on lived experience, multimodal expression, and affective complexities. Finally, incorporating feminist understandings of Asian migrant mother-daughter relationships enriches broader feminist conversations in Aotearoa New Zealand through amplifying intersectional lived experiences.