Negotiated voices: Reflections on educational experiences and identity by two transnational migrant women

In this paper, as two transnational migrant women of colour we explore both privilege and disempowerment as afforded us by our education, laden with postcolonial influences and reinscribed patriarchal limits. We also examine our sense of vulnerability and 'voicelessness' as migrants in defining our positionalities and gendered identities within a transnational space. Within the conjunctures in our stories we analyse the impacts of postcolonialism, education, gender, patriarchy, identity discourses and transnationality. Using evocative autoethnography through 'intimate landscapes' of self-confession we focus on intergenerational female relationships, in particular with our mothers. Through socio-cultural, postcolonial and transnational feminist lenses we substantiate our arguments on the denial of 'voice,' irrespective of educational achievements. Our stories contribute to discourses surrounding the ambiguities around contested and intersecting notions of education, gender, social and cultural differences and identities within the spaces of postcolonial histories and transnationalism.