Moors, Jureidini, Özbay, Sabban 157Reconceptualizing the public sphere
In order to discuss migrant domestic workers’ participation in the pub-
lic sphere, conventional notions of the modern public sphere need to be
reassessed—in particular, the Habermasian notion that participants in
the modern public sphere are considered equals in public debate, who
acknowledge the power of rational argumentation and are not hindered
by attachments to particular interests or identities. As Fraser has convinc-
ingly argued, such an account of the modern public sphere fails to address
issues of voice, authority, and exclusion, and does not recognize that the
public sphere is in fact an arena for the formation and enactment of social
identities. Rejecting the notion of a unified public sphere, she argues that
members of subordinate groups, such as women, may find it advantageous
to constitute alternative publics. To this end she proposes the term “sub-
altern counterpublics”: “parallel discursive arenas where members of sub-
ordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formu-
late oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs.”^20
ut “subaltern publics,” whether women or migrants, also have their B
own forms of exclusion. Simply recognizing that inequalities between
men and women need to be included in debates on the development of
the public sphere is insufficient; a focus on the case of migrant domestic
labor highlights that there are severe inequalities and hierarchies between
women. This understanding also entails a critique of the ways in which
the public is constructed as separate from the private. For it is precisely
because of the presence of large numbers of domestic workers—migrants
or not—that middle-class women have been able to participate in the
public while simultaneously living up to the norms of private domestic-
ity common in their social circles. The employment of domestics has in
fact made it possible for middle-class women to become the epitome of
domesticity “without becoming dirty.”^21 Migrant domestic workers, in
contrast, have been criticized for not living up to the norms of mother-
hood and domesticity by leaving their children in the care of others.^22 At
the site of employment, there is a similar contrast. Whereas the home is a
site of privacy for the employer, it is a workplace for the domestic worker;
in order to find some privacy domestics need to leave the home and move
“into the public.”