Democracy as an Object of Cultural Politics: Anti-racist Feminist Contestations and Reimaginations

Conventional understandings of politics shape our understanding of democracy. Democracy is thought of as a mode of governance and as a way to rule through the will of the people, and it has become a moral principle tied in with liberalism and universalism. What happens when democracy becomes the object of cultural politics? Throughout the social sciences and humanities, the term cultural politics has been used in various ways. It has been used to delineate the politics of the cultural sector creative and artistic practices. This has included critiques of precarity commodification but also transformative practices (Spiegel and Ortiz Choukroun 2019). Moreover, it has been used to politicize practices emerging from pop and sub-cultures that are typically not seen as political. British cultural studies, for example, explored cultural politics that aim at bottom-up and top-down identity formation (Gilroy 1993, Hall 1997, McRobbie 1991). In media studies, the term has been used to refer to the creation of counter-publics that open the door to political statements or actions (Cobb 2020). On a broader level, cultural politics can be thought of as a concept that pays attention to the symbolic situatedness of political practices, conditions or possibilities, as well as conflicts around the legitimacy or illegitimacy of political trajectories (Grayson 2016). Through this more conceptual understanding of cultural politics, this paper will provide examples of how anti-racist feminist theories from both sides of the Atlantic challenge hegemonic representations of democracy and, through that, reimagine social and political relations, spaces and “democratic” practices.