In/visibility, Public-Making and the Politics of Becoming

Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for Asenbaum's book departs with the classical problem of identity-based political action. While recognizing the democratic merits of arranging democratic participation in ways that incorporate marginalized identities into arenas of decision-making, feminist scholarship has equally recognized how such identity-based practices tend to reify existing identity categories, and risk reducing people to mere representatives of those categories. Asenbaum's book asks how we could solve this "dilemma of difference." One way forward, says Asenbaum, is exploring the radical democratic potential of anonymity and disidentification. Building on feminist and queer theory, Asenbaum conceptualizes the self as a constantly shifting assemblage, and sketches the prospect of a "politics of becoming" that combines the potential for expressing marginalized identity with the freedom for the subject to change. Such identity reconfigurations are a distinct feature, and a unique affordance of our current digital age. New communicative channels, says Asenbaum, provide novel means to articulate who we are. A key vehicle for this in Asebaum's thinking is disidentification, which allows us to distance ourselves from the identity performances of our everyday interactions and explore our inner multiplicity. For truly democratic spaces and futures, Asenbaum argues, we must make sure that our democratic practices recognize the multiplicity and the changing character of the self, and allow this multiplicity to be performed. It is only through such performances of the self, Asenbaum claims, that the democratic subject In this symposium, three democracy scholars with expertise in digital reflect on the book's arguments. Anastasia Kavada starts us off by taking up