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3 O n t h e V e ry Id e a o f a D i s c i p l i n a ry C o u n t e r p u b l i c Three Exemplary Cases If I should take a notion To jump into the ocean, T’ain’t nobody’s business if I do. If I go to church on Sunday Then cabaret all day Monday, T’ain’t nobody’s business if I do . . . I swear I won’t call no copper If I’m beat up by my papa, T’ain’t nobody’s business if I do, Nobody’s business, Ain’t nobody’s business, Nobody’s business if I do. —Four verses from Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins (Billie Holiday version) In her efforts to revise our understanding of what constitutes a public, Nancy Fraser finds herself disputing not only the theoretical assumptions that inform Jürgen Habermas’s idea of the public sphere but also conventional ideas about what is deemed private, and what public. One of these conventional ideas is that the public may be defined simply as that which is “of concern to everyone” (Habermas 1990, 71). But who, exactly, constitutes “everyone”? After all, US citizenship has never been an all-inclusive status, and even if one were to reply that, despite this fact, citizens are those who act responsibly on behalf of all persons (even noncitizens), one would have a very difficult case to make. The historical evidence does not support such a claim, and in our own nation’s past, it seems hardly necessary to point out that many people have not even been granted the status of persons, much less citizens. Everyone, it turns out, does not mean everyone. Fraser thus rightly concludes that insofar as who constitutes a public , only those persons qualify who have been extended access to publics 98    After the public turn and public participation, for it is they, and only they, who may exercise the privilege of naming precisely that which is of “concern to everyone .” What must be done, then, is to expand our available publics, and thereby multiply the available opportunities for public participation. But in doing so, Fraser observes, we cannot escape (nor should we want to escape) the necessity for what she calls “discursive contestation.” Obviously, as publics broaden, more and more disputes will emerge about agendas and policies. But just as obviously, more and more disputes will emerge about what counts as a legitimate public concern. To illuminate this point, she returns to her central example of the feminist subaltern counterpublic: [U]ntil quite recently, feminists were in the minority in thinking that domestic violence against women was a matter of common concern and thus a legitimate topic of public discourse. The great majority of people considered this issue to be a private matter between what was assumed to be a fairly small number of heterosexual couples (and perhaps the social and legal professionals who were supposed to deal with them). Then, feminists formed a subaltern counterpublic from which we disseminated a view of domestic violence as a widespread systemic feature of male-dominated societies. Eventually, after sustained discursive contestation, we succeeded in making it a common concern. (Fraser 1990, 71) From being a private concern—one traditionally cordoned off from the scrutiny of others—to being a matter that ought to be a “concern for everyone,” domestic abuse was transformed into a public issue, largely because of the efforts of those who belonged to a late twentieth-century, feminist subaltern counterpublic. From a retrospective vantage point, it seems astonishing that, for many, the real scandal was not domestic violence committed against women but rather the fact that such violence was exposed at all, that it was made public by others. I want to suggest that, in varying degrees, a kindred revulsion can be found in numerous other examples of laying bare that which had once been protectively enclosed, quarantined, out of sight (or should I say, bracketed?). In other words, I maintain that there is something irrevocably transgressive about the act of going public and that some sense of violation, whether articulated or not, will most likely accompany any such act.1 More tailored to my purposes here, I want to extend this claim to intellectuals, scholars, and researchers—those who traditionally locate their work within the academic disciplines but who nonetheless...

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