Feminist Research on Language Teacher Identity

This chapter explores feminist perspectives on language teacher identity. I first discuss the definition of feminist research and focuses of feminist research. I introduce the definitions of feminist research provided by several famous feminist researchers and illustrate focuses of feminist research, such as women’s experiences as knowledge, awareness of power dynamics, and feminist research as social change. Second, I examine feminist theories such as standpoint epistemology, intersectionality, and poststructural feminist theory, because these theoretical frameworks are important to analyze and understand female teacher identities. Third, I discuss methodologies, methods, and ethics of feminist research. I explain not only feminist qualitative research but also why feminist researchers prefer qualitative research. Ethics of feminist research, including researcher-researched relationships, positionalities, and reflexivity are illustrated. Fourth, I review several empirical studies that focused on language teacher identity from a feminist point of view. These studies focus not only on identities as multiple, diverse, contradictory, and performative, but also on how gender affects language teaching and vice versa. Lastly, I propose possibilities for feminist language teacher identity research.