Feminist counterpublics and democratic innovations. Strategies for an inclusive deepening of democracy

Authors

  • Jone Martínez-Palacios Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18042/cepc/rep.178.04

Keywords:

Inclusion, democratisation, feminist political theory, architecture of oppression, deliberative democracy, participation, deliberative critical theory.

Abstract

This article studies the benefits and the limits of integrating feminist counterpublics in democratic innovations, through inclusive democratization processes. We take Nancy Fraser’s definition of ‘counterpublics’, and propose an operational definition that was applied in fifteen democratic innovations undertaken in the Basque Country, between 1978 and 2016. Data extracted from 42 life stories of women participating either in one of the fifteen interventions, or in five focus groups, suggest that: 1) participants from among these counterpublics have a greater ability to detect the structures of oppression in participatory contexts; 2) participants from these counterpublics generate strategies to deal with situations of exclusion within democratic innovations that could be exportable to other social contexts ; and 3) although the identification of barriers is a first step to designing more inclusive democratic innovations, it is not sufficient to disable the reproduction of power relations based on domination. Understanding the complexity of domination is not sufficient, but it is necessary.