Gender studies is not synonymous with women’s studies, feminist criticism, or queer theory though it may encompass all of these. Gender refers to the social and symbolic relations of perceived sexual differences. In literary studies it provides a concept, a category of analysis, that enables us to think about how and why the terms “man” and “woman,” and the differences between them, have been produced historically through language. Gendered readings of Latin American novels, therefore, will focus on the constructions of masculinities and femininities in specific texts, the aim being to explore how this category of identification predicated on sexual difference is inscribed discursively in a particular time and place and how it comes to function as a principle of social organization and representation. Such a reading will also involve being alert to textual renditions of sexualities (sexual desires and behaviors) and questioning the heterosexual norm. Inevitably, power is a key issue here; what gendered readings hope to expose is the interplay of gender and social control, the fallacy of the self-contained autonomous individual (predicated on the masculine universal subject set up only by virtue of what it is not), and the exclusion of those identified (by themselves or others) as women or transgendered subjects. Gendered readings should be subversive in that they historicize the gender relations informing the cultural constructions of collective identities and thus unmask and challenge resulting power relations. Attention to the significance of gender has resulted in a sea change in the way the Latin American novel is perceived, interpreted, valued, and produced.