Volume 6, Issue 4 (Fall 1997)

From the Guest Editor's Desk

The four articles contained in this issue of the Colonial Latin American Historical Review provide an important discussion of the intersections of gender, religion, and sexuality. In the first two articles, by Nancy E. van Deusen and Kathleen A. Myers, religious practices and institutions and their effects on, and opportunities for, women's lives furnish the focus. For Dedra S. McDonald and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, issues of transgression and sexual assault provide the data for an examination of gender relations and women's options within prevailing gender ideologies. All of the articles, moreover, show the profound relationship between all of these themes. Each article demonstrates the ways in which prevailing ideas about gender and gender right, no exclusively but often religious in inspiration, influenced not only women's behavior but also their voices and their silences, the parameters of their existence, and even the images that they held of themselves.

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