Shami 33publics, on competing publics and on counter-publics.^15 In addition, Göle
stresses that, “Public spheres undergo changes. We cannot speak therefore
of the public sphere as a pre-established, immutable arena. The inclusion
of new social groups requires a redefinition of that sphere’s frontiers and
normative values. Newcomers reveal the limits of the public sphere as it is
constituted and imagined by society and its legislators at a given time.”^16
Göle alerts us to the fact that “the question of a social bond with the stig-
matized and excluded is the essential problem of democracy,”^17 and such
“newcomers” may represent those very groups (publics) upon whose
exclusion the nation has been constituted.
ese theoretical moves lead us to see publics as historically cre-Th
ated through turbulent, provisional and open-ended processes of strug-
gle, change and challenge. Publics are (continually) emergent rather than
stable units. Publics and counter-publics form through, and in relation to,
certain discourses, texts, performances, structures and institutions. They
may be overlapping in their constituencies and they are always partial
(if only because they are gendered and distributed along various axes of
power), but they tend to represent themselves as totalities and inclusive:
the public rather than a public.^18 Publics are created through processes
of inclusion but also of exclusion (of women, of minorities, of the handi-
capped, of refugees, of migrant workers, of youth—the list could go on).
Hegemonic publics are often unmarked (e.g., assumed to stand for the
whole, most often the nation) but it is important to remember that this
‘homogeneity’ is enforced through law, sanction and social practices of
exclusion.
What of counter-publics then? Could one generalize that hegemonic
publics are characterized by naturalization and silencing of difference,
while counter-publics, forced to recognize and struggle against dominant
categories, are therefore reflexive—though they may be equally exclusion-
ary through a “membership” that is rigorously and publicly defined and
enforced?^19 Göle’s interpretation of the furor in the Turkish parliament
over an MP wearing a headscarf would also support such a conclusion.^20
She indicates that the authoritarian and secular “dominant” public (includ-
ing its female members) is marked by a lack of reflexivity vis-à-vis both
their past and modernity, while the Islamists stand in a disjunctive rela-
tionship to both the “modern” (whether the West or the secular Turks)