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"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its basis in a particular conception of rationality."

In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women’s Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case.

Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is.

In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women’s movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism."

In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

Mexican communities in the United States faced more than unemployment during the Great Depression. Discrimination against Mexican nationals and similar prejudices against Mexican Americans led the communities to seek help from Mexican consulates, which in most cases rose to their defense.
 
Los Angeles’s consulate was confronted with the country’s largest concentration of Mexican Americans, for whom the consuls often assumed a position of community leadership. Whether helping the unemployed secure repatriation and relief or intervening in labor disputes, consuls uniquely adapted their roles in international diplomacy to the demands of local affairs.

The term “el pueblo” is used throughout Latin America, referring alternately to small towns, to community, or to “the people” as a political entity. In this vivid anthropological and historical analysis of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Paul K. Eiss explores the multiple meanings of el pueblo and the power of the concept to unite the diverse claims made in its name. Eiss focuses on working-class indigenous and mestizo populations, examining how those groups negotiated the meaning of el pueblo among themselves and in their interactions with outsiders, including landowners, activists, and government officials. Combining extensive archival and ethnographic research, he describes how residents of the region have laid claim to el pueblo in varied ways, as exemplified in communal narratives recorded in archival documents, in the performance of plays and religious processions, and in struggles over land, politics, and the built environment. Eiss demonstrates that while el pueblo is used throughout the hemisphere, the term is given meaning and power through the ways it is imagined and constructed in local contexts. Moreover, he reveals el pueblo to be a concept that is as historical as it is political. It is in the name of el pueblo—rather than class, race, or nation—that inhabitants of northwestern Yucatán stake their deepest claims not only to social or political rights, but over history itself.

In Indigenous Media in Mexico, Erica Cusi Wortham explores the use of video among indigenous peoples in Mexico as an important component of their social and political activism. Funded by the federal government as part of its "pluriculturalist" policy of the 1990s, video indígena programs became social processes through which indigenous communities in Oaxaca and Chiapas engendered alternative public spheres and aligned themselves with local and regional autonomy movements.

Drawing on her in-depth ethnographic research among indigenous mediamakers in Mexico, Wortham traces their shifting relationship with Mexican cultural agencies; situates their work within a broader, hemispheric network of indigenous media producers; and complicates the notion of a unified, homogeneous indigenous identity. Her analysis of projects from community-based media initiatives in Oaxaca to the transnational Chiapas Media Project highlights variations in cultural identity and autonomy based on specific histories of marginalization, accommodation, and resistance.

The contributors to Individual and Community attempt to illuminate aspects of the individual-community relationship. Though different in focus and approach, the essays themselves express a "community" of concern, a concern which includes not just the situations of characters in fictional worlds, but one which touches the relationship of both novelists and reader to a world of words.
The essays are intended to point to the continuity of an important theme in American fiction and to offer insight into the variety of philosophical and literary strategies utilized in significant works of significant authors in dealing with the question of the individual and the community.

In this important contribution both to the study of social protest and to French social history, Roger Gould breaks with previous accounts that portray the Paris Commune of 1871 as a continuation of the class struggles of the 1848 Revolution. Focusing on the collective identities framing conflict during these two upheavals and in the intervening period, Gould reveals that while class played a pivotal role in 1848, it was neighborhood solidarity that was the decisive organizing force in 1871.

The difference was due to Baron Haussmann's massive urban renovation projects between 1852 and 1868, which dispersed workers from Paris's center to newly annexed districts on the outskirts of the city. In these areas, residence rather than occupation structured social relations. Drawing on evidence from trail documents, marriage records, reports of police spies, and the popular press, Gould demonstrates that this fundamental rearrangement in the patterns of social life made possible a neighborhood insurgent movement; whereas the insurgents of 1848 fought and died in defense of their status as workers, those in 1871 did so as members of a besieged urban community.

A valuable resource for historians and scholars of social movements, this work shows that collective identities vary with political circumstances but are nevertheless constrained by social networks. Gould extends this argument to make sense of other protest movements and to offer predictions about the dimensions of future social conflict.