Both privileged and disadvantaged: multiple identities of a Japanese female academic in an Australian university

The study is an autoethnography of the researcher’s multiple identities as a Japanese female academic who works at an Australian university, focusing on her feelings of both privilege and disadvantage. Asian female academics who work for universities in Western countries tend to find their ethnicities and cultural backgrounds a disadvantage, especially in the current competitive neoliberal environment. The researcher considers her own self-narratives about her different identities, experiences related to those identities, and her consequent feelings of privilege or disadvantage. She analyzes the narratives with thematic analysis and discovers four major themes related to her identities: (1) identities as a native speaker of Japanese and as a user of English as a second language; (2) identities related to her cultural background; (3) identities as a group member of the university and related to her roles; and (4) identities related to her gender. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, the study contributes to our understanding of the experiences of minority academics in Western universities by uncovering the intersectional complexities of the researcher’s multiple identities, which are affected by sociopolitical and institutional structures and by issues of power, as well as by her linguistic and cultural background and her gender.