Written by Hispanic and non-Hispanic scholars, these twelve essays -- six in English and six in Spanish -- disclose how over the past four centuries static and formulaic images of women in Hispanic art and literature have given way to lively and original portrayals. The leading ladies explored in this volume include women who are objects of the male gaze, women who gaze upon the male body, women who are characters, and women who are writers, painters, and filmmakers. The essayists offer a panorama that stimulates the senses and challenges assumptions as they reveal strategies used by both male and female writers and artists to unmask conventions, identify spaces, and remake paradigms.

Marina Mayoral's introduction traces the representation of the beloved woman in Spanish lyric poetry from the Middle Ages to the present. The contributors and topics that follow include Amy Robinson on the silencing of female voices such as those of Cecilia Valdés and Carmen; Vilma Navarro-Daniels on the writer and historian Carmen Martín Gaite; Lynn Walford's analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa's leading ladies; Katherine Ford's exploration of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera; Julia Carroll on Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi; George Thomas on the poetry of the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Alison Tatum-Davis on Carmen Laforet's Nada; Mónica Jato's examination of three female characters from Alfonso Sastre's trilogy Los crímenes extraños; Caryn Connelly on the collaborations of Mexican scriptwriter Paz Alicia Garcíadiego and film director Arturo Ripstein; Sharon Keefe Ugalde on cinema gender referents in the work of certain Spanish women poets; Carmen García de la Rasilla's study of female surrealist artists; and Mayte de Lama on three short-story characters of the fiction writer Marina Mayoral. Covering numerous genres, reaching across three continents, and using a variety of critical strategies, Leading Ladies presents a dazzling array of artistic endeavors in which women are of central importance.