Breaking the chains to a sickness: Feminism, the public sphere, media and democracy

This dissertation interrogates relationships among feminist discourse, the concept of the public sphere, democratic theory and the communications media. It describes the influence of the Habermasian notion of the "public sphere" on the construction of feminist perspectives on culture, communication, participation and political action. Feminist scholars have made important contributions to democratic political theory by arguing that the bourgeois public sphere represents a masculinist ideological notion and reconstructing the public sphere concept in an attempt to create an egalitarian basis for public participation.; However, viewing feminist reconceptualizations in relation to the role of the communications media in the context of a contemporary practice of democracy reveals their failure to acknowledge or analyze the extent to which late-capitalism's media exclude and repress certain members of a society. At the same time, much of feminist media scholarship has become too devoted to the populist project of exploring "private" practices of consumption (romance reading, soap opera viewing) to provide an adequate direction for feminist scholars wishing to pursue the question of how feminists can access and intervene in the media of the public sphere. If feminist perspectives are to account for the media's role in the public sphere, they must focus on cultural acts of production and strategic interventions in the institutions of dominant culture, particularly in media and education systems.; The approach taken in this dissertation is both dialectical and inter-textual in that it attempts to locate correspondences among dominant signifying practices, feminist signifying practices, and texts brought into association with one another via the signifier "prostitution," all within the social and historical context of the "public sphere." The case study analysis of prostitution explores problems of media, identity and representation in order to argue that one cannot take for granted feminism's effectiveness as a counter-discourse or the media's effectiveness as a carrier of oppositional causes in the public sphere.