Moving beyond Public and Private Spheres

On the descriptive or empirical level, the distinction between the public and private spheres has already broken down.^[28] The

political recognition and legal guarantees that created the domestic sphere demonstrate that the family is not a domain free from state intervention. The state has always played a major role in defining the family.^[29] For example, the difficulties encountered by lesbians and gay men as they seek to acquire custody of their children, marry, and adopt indicates the way in which the state defines the family in exclusively heterosexual terms. Moreover, as child abuse, domestic violence, and marital rape have become issues for political debate and legal regulation, even the illusion of a division has begun to fade away. With the increase in divorce, the number of single-parent households, and the variety in living arrangements, one can no longer think of the private sphere as referring exclusively or even predominantly to male-headed families. Such a conception hinders public attention to the need for new ways of dealing with reproduction, the care and socialization of children, the medical needs of those not part of traditional families and thus outside of conventional health insurance policies, and the challenges presented by the growing number of senior citizens. Furthermore, as the work of women of color has taught us, the very notion of a male-headed family blinds us to race, to the extended kinship arrangements in nonwhite families and the leadership role taken by many African American women in the home.^[30]

Additionally, the idea of the public sphere fails to capture the diversity of public spheres within modern civil society.^[31] Criticizing Habermas's conception of the "liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere," Nancy Fraser cites recent historiography that illustrates that this sphere was one among a plurality of competing discursive spheres. To be sure, Fraser misinterprets the Habermasian conception of the public sphere. Rather than referring strictly to the public debates among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, Habermas emphasizes the formal norms of publicity, equality, and reciprocity, which served as critical ideals of democratic debate. What is significant about Fraser's discussion, however, is that she highlights how women, workers, ethnic groups, and lesbians and gay men have continuously created spaces in which they have published, voiced, interpreted, and debated their concerns. The conception of one particular space in which citizens disregard their particular concerns and discuss matters of general interest thus fails to reveal, and hence denigrates, the participatory activity of large numbers of agents in civil society. It elevates one aspect of civil society above the others, furthering their exclusion by focusing on the words and actions within this restricted "public" sphere.

How the dissolution of the boundaries between the public and pri-

vate spheres is to be worked out on the conceptual level is a more difficult problem. Some feminists have voiced the fear that the demise of the intimate sphere implies the loss or devaluation of the nurturing and maternal values associated with women. Others have claimed that women's values can solve the problems of a masculinely constructed civil society (such views often come very close to communitarianism).^[32] Both positions arise out of the binary terms in which traditional conceptions of civil society have been drawn. They posit the difference between male and female attributes and virtues so strongly that they neglect the elements of power and struggle within the private sphere and the potential for connection and recognition within the public. Types of action are reduced to spheres of action, making it impossible to acknowledge either the role of communicative action in both intimate and public spheres or the presence and problem of strategic action in each of these spheres. In short, such a reduction fails to allow for the possibility of associations of reflective solidarity.

A better approach to civil society involves beginning not with a division between the public and the private but with the goal of including women. With this as our goal, we attempt from the start to conceive of solidary relations in which difference is both respected and part of our mutual accountability.

Cohen and Arato's theory of civil society is helpful in this regard. Relying on Habermas's system-lifeworld distinction, they conceive of civil society as a communicatively integrated sphere differentiated from the state and the economy. Through institutions that preserve and renew cultural traditions, group solidarities, and individual and social identities, civil society mediates between the lives of social members and the state and economic systems. This complex model of state, economy, and civil society thus depicts contemporary societies as drawing from three resources to secure integration—money, administrative power, and solidarity.^[33] Accordingly, despite the fact that civil society is understood as influencing the state and the economy, it does not control them. Both the state and the economy are crucial for the systemic integration of complex modern societies. Unlike approaches that challenge the continued existence of the state and the economy, by focusing on the political dimensions of civil society, Cohen and Arato can argue for an extension of radical democracy that does not threaten overall social stability.

This model of civil society, then, relies on a reconstruction of the normative dimension of traditional theories of civil society. It is based on an ideal of democratic legitimacy rooted in discourse ethics and a

framework of basic rights.^[34] Accordingly, Cohen and Arato stress that the fundamental coordinating mechanism within civil society is communicative action. Of course, communicative action is not the only source of social solidarity—if it were, the advocation of "town meetings" for millions might be a sound strategy instead of a naive idea. Rather, associations in civil society are part of a complex network of relationships. The expansion and differentiation of discursive spheres and the institutionalization of democratic decision-making procedures throughout and within these associations, then, are what enable this network to secure the conditions necessary for the development of reflective solidarities. So, despite their insistence on a separation between public and private spheres and their use of concepts like the juridical subject and the autonomous individual that have come under feminist attack, Cohen and Arato's model nonetheless asserts the primacy and centrality of democratic participation and discursive questioning within an inclusive notion of civil society.

Relying on this model, I reinterpret those categories Cohen and Arato see as constitutive to a democratic, participatory conception of civil society from a feminist perspective aimed at including women.^[35] My reinterpretation is structured in terms of the ideas of recognition and exclusion that lie at the heart of the feminist critiques. To overcome the opposition between universal and particular recognition and to emphasize the importance of the social questioning of traditional conceptions of roles, I revise Cohen and Arato's categories of the autonomous, self-reflective, moral individual and the juridical subject by stressing the notion of the embodied person and the importance of discursive rights. This revision appeals to the importance of the intersubjective questioning of interpretations of social norms, roles, rights, and needs for reflective solidarity while emphasizing the necessity of securing the conditions required for such questioning. To capture the feminist insight into continuing instances of practical exclusion at the levels of institutionalization and cultural interpretation, I stress publicity, democratic participation, and plurality. Publicity serves to expose those interpretations that have excluded women and others from civil society. Democratic participation and plurality help to create the spaces and anchor the potential for the active inclusion of each social member. These reinterpretations, then, move beyond the distinction between the public and private spheres and enable us to conceive of a civil society that includes women as one made up of a series of interconnected discursive spheres.^[36]