ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author draws attention to women's legal representations as a source for understanding women's relationship to power in the colonial Andes. She analyzes a small sample of cases from the notarial archive of mid colonial Cuzco. Images of women served as a fertile figuring-ground for Andean of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To be sure, men's depictions of women's bodies enabled them to make radically different kinds of statements. Yet when availing themselves of legal forms of protest against "bad patriarchs," women seem to have gone in for a saturated femininity, the most concentrated possible version. On January 2, 1696, the wife of a local Spanish authority registered an unusually lengthy exclamation in which the language of fear and respect is salient, with enough additional detail that one has the impression of reading about a woman who is seriously scared.
