The Complex Construction of Professional Identities: Female EFL Educators in Japan Speak Out

This article reports on the life history narratives of nine female EFL teachers working in higher education in Japan. An interpretive qualitative analysis of the stories suggested that gender cannot be viewed as a free‐floating attribute of individual subjectivities but rather must be seen as one of many components in an ever‐evolving network of personal, social, and cultural circumstances. Consequently, this study does not provide a unitary description of how gender intersects with English language teaching and learning. It offers a more complicated version of female teachers' lives, and in so doing, it challenges and expands prevalent TESOL education theories that do not fully address the confusions and transitions in teachers' career trajectories. I was especially interested in how, in the face of ideological constraints, the participants engaged with sociocultural circumstances, constructed their identities as educators, and mobilized available resources to contest oppressive forces in their professional lives. The in‐depth, open‐ended life history interviews enabled me to write and to understand work identities dialogically. Using local social actors' narratives to foreground how their interpretations of work contexts interrelate with hegemonic ideologies provides access points that will help the field reconceptualize TESOL's goals.