ABSTRACT
The study of "new social movements" has involved important confrontations with the homogenizing habits of mind social theory has traditionally fostered. It has engaged the heterogeneity of Latin American social formations and of social-political agency. The current phase of capitalist expansion, and its political consequences, are being lived out in vastly different ways by people in different places and situations. For Olivia Maria Gomes Da Cunha, Jeffrey Rubin, and others, the cultural enables the analyst to localize and relativize political agendas by seeing them as embedded in political cultures. Oppositional movements, so the argument goes, work against dominant power structures, but they work within political cultures shared with the dominant power structures. This perspective raises the possibility of intervening not only in the dominant power structures but in the shared political culture that underwrites both dominant and oppositional movements. The insights of feminism have been, and remain, crucial to revealing the cultural dimensions of the political.
