The Public Sphere

If you visit any major city in Australia, the UK or the USA, you'll be able to find a community newspaper directed at gay men and lesbians. The Pink Paper, The Sydney Star Observer, the Dallas Voice, Boyz and hundreds of others provide a space where gay men and lesbians can find out what's happening in their area, follow public debates of relevance to their community, and develop a distinct public sphere for their culture. These community newspapers include stories about individual gay men and lesbians, discussions of legislation relevant to sexuality, reports on research into gay and lesbian issues, reviews of Queer culture and interviews with its producers. Queer newspapers, magazines, videos, public meetings and television programs contribute to a ‘Queer public sphere’; one of many distinct public spheres which are addressed to a particular culture in Western countries. As I've discussed in this book, we can also find Black public spheres (Dawson, 1995: 219–220) and feminist public spheres (Felski, 1989). In the first three chapters I've argued that different cultures offer different identities to participants, including different kinds of knowledge and different ways of communicating about that knowledge. Is it a good thing that different cultures have their own public spaces, addressing issues that are supposed to be of interest to them, using their own culture's forms of communication? Or is it rather another sign of the degeneration of the public sphere?

Some popular and academic writers worry that the public sphere in Western countries is fragmenting.