ABSTRACT
The connotation of the term subalterned is used to underscore an imposed state of subsidiarity. Hegemonic forces within our professional workplaces succeed insidiously at enforcing submission to categorizations that legitimize and maintain postcolonial hierarchies. Resistance to this imposed order transpires in the ghettoized positions of women of color and migrant social workers. Their interrogating and dissenting voices are assertions of an oppositional knowledge that is an important source for feminism in social work to utilize for a rethinking of its history and future trajectories. This chapter is a self-indicting critique of a profession’s intended or unintended creation of a subaltern ghetto within its own community. Yet, ghettoes are where strategies for collective resistance are tried, tested and tempered in strength. Such resistance may yet flourish into renewed forms of revolutionary feminist expression in the social work profession.
