This chapter focuses on five major areas of research and analysis in anthropology and related social sciences which have emerged during the 1980s and 1990s and provide the groundwork for future research. These include: the change from the study of women to the study of gender; the relationship of gender to ethnicity and class; the placement of gender and other categories of difference in a global economic and political context. It also includes the study of women's participation in social and popular movements; and the influence of postmodernism and alternative forms of presentation such as life histories, autobiographies, and dialogue on the relationship which researchers have with the women they research. The chapter concludes that both recognition of differences between Latin American women and critical analysis of the process of research and the way that women are represented in texts are extremely important advances which were made in the past decade.