Parallel Subaltern Feminist Counterpublics in Cyberspace

The historically exclusive nature of public spaces and discourses is beyond dispute. While feminist and “other” counterpublics have provided alternative ways of organizing public interaction and dialogue, these have remained largely invisible to nonparticipants. New information technologies afford new possibilities for feminist counterpublics to influence the norms of participation and boundaries between insiders and outsiders in mainstream public spaces. In this article I argue that feminist counterpublics in cyberspace are evidence of a new development in social discourse: the creation of subaltern parallel counterpublics distinguishable from oppositional/separatist counterpublics based, to differing degrees, on identity politics.