From a Marxist-populist perspective, it views popular or folk religion as a recurring site where poor people reflect on class inequalities and devise understandings of morality and justice consistent with their self-interests.
Chronicling the lives of three poor families among their networks of friends and kin, it dissects plural and intimate forms of power—in gender relations, color discriminations, and same-sex relationships—that, Lancaster argues, undermined attempts to construct a revolutionary New Man (and Woman) and thus subverted the Sandinista project from below.
Weaving semiotics, poststructuralism, and the Bakhtin school into an overarching Marxist approach, Life is Hard traded in the topical eclecticism of cultural studies, setting brisk chapters of media criticism alongside interviews and descriptions of Nicaragua's survival economy.
[4][5] Lancaster's third monograph, The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (2003), was a polemic against evolutionary psychology and other reductionist explanations for gender roles and sexual orientations.
In addition to his monographs, Lancaster coedited (with Micaela di Leonardo) The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy (1997), a large advanced interdisciplinary introduction to the field.