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Making a Difference: Toward a Feminist Democratic Theory in the Digital Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2019

Hans Asenbaum
Hans Asenbaum*
Affiliation:
University of Westminster
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Abstract

This essay asks how the democratic ideal of inclusion can be achieved in societies marked by power asymmetries along the lines of identity categories such as gender and race. It revisits debates of difference democracy of the 1990s, which promoted inclusion through a politics of presence of marginalized social groups. This strategy inevitably entails essentializing tendencies, confining the democratic subject within its physically embodied identity. Difference democrats did not take notice of the parallel emerging discourse on cyberfeminism exploring novel identity configurations on the Internet. This essay augments the politics of presence with digital identity reconfigurations. Neither difference democrats nor cyberfeminists distinguish between various participatory sites. Drawing on conceptions of participatory spaces from development studies and deliberative democracy, this essay generates a typology differentiating between empowered spaces such as parliaments, invited spaces such as citizens' assemblies, and the claimed spaces of social movements. The democratic functions these spaces fulfil are best facilitated by three different modes of identity performance: identity continuation, identity negation, and identity exploration. A pluralization of participatory sites and modes of identity performance facilitates inclusion while tackling the essentializing tendencies in difference democracy.

Keywords

democratic theoryfeminist theorycyberfeminismonline participationanonymitydemocratic innovations
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 16 , Special Issue 1: Special Symposium on Women's Parties , March 2020 , pp. 230 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

I would like to express my thanks to Selen Ercan and Marion Stöger, whose extensive comments have helped improve this article. I am also deeply grateful to Kimmo Grönlund and the Social Science Research Institute at Åbo Akademi University for a visiting fellowship that enabled me to work on this paper. Finally, my thanks go to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

References

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