This special issue of Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies focuses on the intersections of gender and disability centered discourses, experiences and theories in rethinking postcolonial identities. In recent Postcolonial theories and identity analysis, the Postcolonial subjects have been studied for their multiple subject positions vis-à-vis race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, but rarely have these identity constructions been explored in terms of disability experiences, theories and discourses.
While medical and legal discourses of disability pervade in postcolonial contexts, relatively few studies have explored humanistic perspectives and dimensions of disability in constituting, reassembling or deploying narratives and theories regarding postcolonial identities. The special issue will undertake the challenge to fill this gap as well as map new directions in theorizing and analyzing intersecting discourses on gender, disability, and postcoloniality in interdisciplinary contexts.

This issue will include articles that are informed by disability centered analysis of Postcolonial identities, and intersections with a network of fields emerging from Culture Studies, such as critical race feminist theory, transnational feminism, visual and performative media, gender analysis, as well as film, environmental and global studies. In addition, articles exploring disability as a cultural construct and human rights discourse in relation to Postcolonial contexts, issues and theories are welcome. Some of the topics of investigation may deal with:

• Challenges to Postcolonial theorizing from intersecting gender and disability discourses.
  
• Impact of Postcolonial theories on analysis and representations of disability/gender issues, subjects, experiences and rights.
  
• Postcolonial Feminist disability theory.
  
• Analysis of social movements focusing on intersecting struggles for gender and disability rights in specific Postcolonial contexts.
  
• Representations of disability and bodies of difference in specific Postcolonial cultures and cultural productions.
  
• Critique of body and transbody phenomena and experiences as represented in futuristic literature and film, such as mechanical body snatchers, aliens, cyborgs and posthumans.
  
• Constructions of disability as represented or examined in Postcolonial theory, literature, film and/or artwork.
  
• Challenges to identity norms in changing cultural landscapes and competing cultural influences.
  
• Exploring norms of sexuality, physical appearance, mental ability and social conformity in Internet Arranged Marriages and Matrimonial web sites and their implications for subjects of disability.
  
• Theorizing Postcoloniality from Disability and GBLT subject positions.
  
• Emerging influence of popular western cultural ethos of physical fitness, beauty and body modification.
  
• Impact of Postcolonial/global phenomena such as war, environmental trauma, poverty and terrorism in rethinking ability/disability categories.
  
• Humanistic discourses of diseases (HIV-AIDS, Cancer, Polio, etc) and Postcolonial reframing of disability.
  
• Gendering disability and disabling gender.
  
• Corpulescence: studies of fatness as socially disabling image construction across cultures.
  
• "Starving Children": Charity and Media exhibitionism of "Third world" subjects of poverty.
  
• Transformative directions in specific disability rights activist movements worldwide and their specific links to other human rights activism.
  
• Disability centered reconsideration of values such as independence and self-reliance, especially as used in feminist discourses, towards concepts of interdependence and intersubjectivity.
  
• Disability and gendered perspectives in theorizing Postcolonial space, especially dealing with issues of accessibility.
  
• Disability culture as local and global phenomena.
  
• Migration and diasporic narratives of Postcolonial subjects of disability.

Please send Abstracts (75 words) in English by Jan 1, 2006, and complete essays (approximately 5,500-7,500 words) by March 1, 2006. Essays in other languages will also be considered. Submissions should be sent electronically in MLA or APA format to: Dr. Pushpa Parekh, Professor of English: pparekh@spelman.edu