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

This essay asks how the democratic ideal of inclusion can be achieved in societies marked by pow-er asymmetries along the lines of identity categories such as gender and race. It revisits debates of difference democracy of the 1990's, 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 distinguished 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 claimed spaces of social movements. The democratic func-tions 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

Subject to Change: Democracy, Disidentification, and the Digital

Radical democratic politics in the digital age is characterized by the widespread emergence of participatory spaces generated by state actors and social movements. These new formats of citizen engagement are situated in the context of social inequalities and discrimination of marginalized identities. To counter this problem, feminist debates in democratic theory associated with the term “difference democracy” advocate a politics of presence through physically embodied representation of marginalized groups, providing visibility in the space of appearance. This strategy, however, entails essentializing tendencies as subjects are judged by their physical appearance rather than the content they utter, a problem described as the “dilemma of difference”. This thesis seeks ways out of the dilemma of difference by advancing both freedom and equality in participatory spaces. It explores the relations of freedom and equality that are described as competing values in the democratic paradox. To make the freedom to explore the multiple self compatible with the equality facilitated through the presence of the marginalized, the thesis engages with a range of radical democratic perspectives. To the established participatory, deliberative, and agonistic approaches it adds feminist and transformative perspectives. On these grounds, it develops the concept of a politics of becoming, which is seen as part of a progressive strategy of systemic transformation. Inspired by queer and gender theory, the politics of becoming reinterprets presence as the performative act of self-constitution. To enlarge the free spaces of the subject to change, the thesis suggests radical democratic practices of disidentification through anonymity that affords the opportunity to reject hegemonic identity interpellations and contributes to a democratization of self-constitution. Drawing on new materialist thought allows for an interpretation of both spatial configurations and the subject as agentic assemblages. Anonymity and other modes of disidentification enable an interruption of such assemblages and reassemble spaces and the self. Digital means of communication provide new affordances for identity expressions. The emerging cyborgian subjects reassemble identity and reconfigure the space of appearance. This results in a new politics of presence that expresses embodied difference but still provides freedom for the subject to change

Revisiting E-topia: Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Findings on Online Anonymity

As social hierarchies along identity markers of gender, race, age etc. are replicated within participatory spaces, the question arises as to how online participation and its modes of identity reconfiguration might affect this dilemma. This paper first revisits the discussions about cyberdemocracy in the 1990s, which focused on the liberating effects of anonymity facilitating an inclusive sphere of equals. It then moves on to the arguments of cyberfeminist debates, criticizing the naivety of cyberdemocracy by pointing to the persistence of offline inequalities in cyberspace. Current discussions pick up this criticism and focus on visual re-embodiment and the persistence of identity online. After giving an overview of these theoretical debates, the paper turns to empirical findings on the effects of online anonymity. Various studies from different disciplines show that anonymity has both democratic and anti-democratic effects. It both liberates the democratic subjects and at the same time contributes to new modes of domination. Thus, the theoretical accounts of optimistic cyberdemocrats and pessimistic cyberfeminists together contribute to a holistic understanding of online anonymity in participatory spaces

The politics of presence revisited

Almost three decades after its first publication, Anne Phillips reflects on the Politics of Presence in the context of contemporary developments from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Granting the importance of a contingent and intersectional understanding of presence, she reemphasizes the necessity of descriptive representation. Phillips reflects on questions of anonymity, essentialism, the multiple self, unconditional equality, and the current role of feminist research in democratic theory. She also opens perspectives toward mending the divide between a politics of recognition and a politics of distribution.</p