Democratizing participation through feminism. The role of feminist subaltern counterpublics in the expansion of the basque public sphere

Abstract

This article aims to understand the limits on the expansion of the public space that is occurring through democratic innovations, and to investigate strategies for overcoming these limits. With an approach rooted in standpoint epistemology, this article studies the participation experiences of sixteen women belonging to a feminist subaltern counterpublic in fifteen apparatuses in the Autonomous Region of the Basque Country. The study considers that this expansion of the public space has taken place with three limits, related to the de-legitimisation of the private, the undervaluation of relational aspects and the naturalization of a universal idea of participation. Opposing this, the article states that the practice of counterpublics facilitates greater inclusion in the designs of democratic innovations due to those parallel publics' subaltern position in the public space.