This dissertation examines the lives of indigenous women in early colonial Peru, residents of the cities of Lima and Trujillo as well as nearby rural regions, between 1532 and 1700. It does so by interweaving two major thematic concerns. On one level, it includes historical investigations, based upon archival records (in particular some two hundred indigenous women's wills from these two cities), into the multiplicity of economic, political and social roles that made up women's daily lives. Their possessions, occupations, values, social networks and strategies for survival are compared, discussed and placed in historical context, without inappropriately generalizing or universalizing their experiences. On another interconnected level, the dissertation examines the hybridity of colonial relations, taking the cultures and institutions of colonial society as fields of contestation and power and investigating them genealogically. By counterpointing chronicles of conquest, notarial documents, and legal and bureaucratic records, the work develops a strategy for reading colonial history that is not predicated upon a neat but false distinction between “European” and “traditional” societies. The contribution of this dissertation is thus not only a rich base of information about colonial women but also the expectation that any such investigation must be creative and open-ended. The five chapters include analyses of the political causes and effects of representations of prehispanic indigenous society in the chronicles of conquest and early histories of Peru; the role of weaving and the development of a gendered division of labor in the colonial economy; urban women's economic roles and networks according to their wills; the cultural significance of their possessions, especially indigenous and European-style clothing; legal and extra-legal strategies regarding property and inheritance; and a genealogy of the “cacica,” indigenous women who held elite office during the colonial period via their claim to continuity with prehispanic political traditions.

This study examines the gender dynamics of the migration and settlement of Indian indentured workers in Trinidad and Guyana between 1845 and 1917, laying particular emphasis on the ways in which migration of Indian women workers impacted and changed the dynamics of the settlement process of Indians in Trinidad and Guyana. I argue in this thesis that the presence of sufficient numbers of females throughout this particular history of indentured migration and settlement had important and far-reaching implications for the nature of rural social and economic formations that evolved in post emancipation societies of Trinidad and Guyana. This thesis, is not then, the story only of women's migration, or their roles in the new social and economic formations in Trinidad and Guyana in the period 1845 to 1917, but also discusses the relational aspects of women's and men's experiences and the politics of gender that influenced the indentureship experiment. I examine the ways in which the presence of a critical mass of women indentured and ex-indentured workers influenced not only the working of the sugarcane economy but also the ways in which the socio-cultural and sexual relationships evolved within the emergent rural community of Indians. The history of migration and indentureship is traced from the recruitment process in India where gender and patriarchy impacted the ways in which females were enlisted for contractual work overseas, to the eventual settlement of Indian women and men workers in their newly adopted homes in Trinidad and Guyana. I have based this thesis on British official sources like annual emigration and immigration reports, official correspondences, parliamentary and other inquiry committee reports, censuses, and non-official sources like contemporary newspapers, journals, travel and planter memoirs, missionary memoirs, an autobiography by Anna Mahase, Sr. born during my period of study, and oral interviews with ex-indentured men and women in Trinidad. Some of the hidden areas of knowledge about indentured men's and women's lives, particularly around questions of social, sexual, and ritual expressions, as also the ways in which the economic and social activities of women and men in peasant households were allocated, have been constructed through the reading of non-official sources like memoirs, newspapers, autobiographies, and three different sources of oral interviews of men and women.

By 1992, due to the Fifth Centennial of the Conquest, an increase in the publication of historic novels were taking place. As a consequence this editorial phenomenon caused the incorporation of new voices to a new tradition of genre already broaden established in Spanish America own to a long tradition of writers. Just at that moment Doña Inés contra el olvido, written by the Venezuelan writer Ana Teresa Torres, came up as an alternative version of telling the history from a woman perspective. Doña Inés, the responsible voice of the story, struck up a monologue in order to recount the Venezuelan history asking to absent speakers already dead. As a main topic the novel explains the dispute on the Curiepe lands, so it poses the conflicts to get the power between two groups or castes to gain the territory control along the three centuries. This research has three specific aims: to put this novel into context within the wide tradition of this particular subgenre, the historical novel; in second place to introduce it in the renovation fulfilled by master pieces of female authorship; and as a last commitment, to describe and analyze the construction of the natioñs account. In fact, Curiepe is turned into a metaphorical territory to ascertain the power in dispute. Here the authoritarian discourse is questioned as well as the significance the minority resistance groups has had when they confront the power ones. Though Doña Inés lets see it is possible to imagine the future when the past is imagined, the final historical pact between these two groups turned irony because it reflects a society which emerges as a result of an established violence from the power. At the same time, in this act of give in and reconcile, the historical sense is lost in the minority group struggle, led by a free slave. That is the reason why the novel also shows a pessimistic view of the history because this conflict persists as a narrative continuity in the Continent history.

Family violence, particularly the battering and abuse by men of women and children, has taken on different meanings over time in various cultures. This study looked at how therapeutic teams in Chile, working to intervene in cycles of violence, understand and define family violence in the 1990's. Using a qualitative and collaborative methodology, this research analyzed family violence discourses by looking at practitioners' personal, professional, and political ideas about physical and sexual abuse within the home. First, the literature about family violence in Chile was reviewed, as well as the political and legal issues that affect clinicians working in this area. Then, four interdisciplinary teams were interviewed with a reflecting team format. Three major themes emerged in the interviews with the teams. One theme was how family violence is defined including individualistic, societal, gender-sensitive, and systemic explanations, and the problems confronted in this task. Family violence was primarily defined as a political problem that is experienced as a private matter mostly by women and children. A second theme was the recursive relation that exists among the teams' interventions to care for their clients and the teams' evolving definitions of their clients. A third theme was the process by which the personal lives of the practitioners are affected by stories of family violence and trauma. Clients' experiences often reminded practitioners of their own vulnerability and potential for vicarious traumatization. The conclusion integrates these findings and outlines implications for research, training, and policy including: the potential of the reflecting team technique as a research tool, the need to include clients in further collaborative research and for gender based participatory research, the development of a curriculum to train practitioners that includes the exploration of personal experiences of family violence and how to confront vicarious traumatization, and the further development of a sound legal framework to confront family violence.