Page 241 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

230 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

gendered structure of bourgeois society. Its prime dilemmas—sameness
or difference—could only be articulated as a consequence, and within
the limits of a public-private distinction rooted in the assumption of
fixed gender identities. Most theorists and historians of the bourgeois
public sphere, including Habermas in both his earlier and his more
recent works, have failed to appreciate the gendered subtext of the
concept (cf. Fraser 1987).
Feminism has been moderately successful in crossing some of the
lines of the public-private distinction. Through the slogan ‘the personal
is political’ feminists have ensured that issues formerly considered
private, such as sexual and family relations, have become legitimate
subjects for political discourse. Another achievement is that supposedly
private and personal experiences are now recognized as legitimate
moral bases for political activism. Especially the latter feminist efforts
might fundamentally alter the gendered assumptions of the bourgeois
public sphere model and eventually overcome the sameness-difference
dilemma.
Young (1987) asserts that the bourgeois public sphere concept
presupposes a civic public consisting of impartial moral reasoners
standing outside the situation discussed, adopting a detached attitude.
This civic public is not misled by particular ends and interests, but
guided by universal rationality. The capacity of human beings
temporarily to discard all non-rational aspects of their existence—
affectivity, desire, feelings—is a necessary assumption in such
deontological theory of reasoning. The ideal of universalist rationality
theoretically and practically excludes women, and not as a mere accident.
‘The ideal of a civic public exhibits a will to unity, and necessitates the
exclusion of aspects of human existence that threaten and disperse the
brotherly unity of straight and upright forms, especially the exclusion of
women’ (Young 1987:59), Young concludes that the bourgeois concept
of the public sphere is ultimately a totalitarian one for it eliminates
otherness by ignoring the irreducible specificity of situations and the
difference among moral subjects. As an alternative Young proposes a
contextualized evaluation of public life which would appreciate specific
discourses due to e.g. the particular experiences of women and ethnic
groups.
To recapitulate the argument of this section: historically and
philosophically the bourgeois public sphere model assumes and
prescribes a universal distinction between rational public aspects of
human nature and emotional private ones. Not coincidentally this
distinction is interlinked with fixed gender roles and identities. This