ABSTRACT
Social justice work in the postcolonial and postsocialist era has recently and quite rightly been focused on the issues of race and gender (Kubota, 2019); however, from our shared reflections, issues related to other assigned identities have also influenced our formative life experiences. Using the notions of the subaltern, silencing and alterity from the work of postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak (1998, 2013, 2020) and others, we share our formative experiences of discrimination in relation to markers of our ethnicity and social class in our ‘home’ countries (Malaysia and the United Kingdom). While we draw attention to the intersections between ethnicity, gender, race and social class in these experiences, our focus is mainly on ethnicity and social class because these are sites of oppression where our stories intersected with one another. Following Spivak (1998, 2000, 2021) we both reflect on our sense of otherness mediated via the implicit and explicit attitudes towards language and social status which were entangled with our shared lack of attachment to our countries of birth.
