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A powerful, opinion-forming public? Rethinking the Habermasian public sphere in a perspective of feminist theory and citizenship

The article's main argument is that a public sphere forms a constructive arena for citizenship practice if we by citizenship understand four components: rights, responsibilities, participation and identity as formulated by Gerard Delanty. The Habermasian (re)working of the concept remains an essential contribution to theories of democracy and of political participation. With this in mind, the author's ambition is to address and to rework a specific type of public: an opinion-forming public within a framework of feminist political theory. The article is informed by the assumption that an opinion-forming public sphere is a central democratic arena in which the process of deliberation has intrinsic value. The analysis draws on a debate where a broader concept of communication than the one proposed by Habermas has been discussed. Iris Marion Young's concept of ‘inclusive communication’, greeting, rhetoric and narratives, is an attempt to widen public communication and further an ambition of constructing a concept of a more inclusive public sphere. The author suggests that feminist political theory goes some of the way towards reconstructing a concept of an opinion-forming public sphere within a Habermasian framework. The empirical cases (the women's rights as human rights movement and a Scandinavian feminist debate) illustrate how participants in such a public can use the public arena for internal learning by employing a broad concept of communication such as narratives and storytelling as a means of politicizing their situation and as a consciousness-raising and identity-giving process. The article also suggests that the positive reasoning around an extended concept of communication can be criticized. The overarching idea is that the type of communication in itself does not provide the democratic inclusion and the egalitarian communication it intends and that decisions made as a result of it can be misleading.