Gender and Diversity in the European Public Spheres

The increasing institutionalization of rights in EU has inspired a debate about the gap between the EU polity and citizens' abilities to influence multilevel governance and politics. The objective of the paper is to discuss diversity in the European public spheres from a gender perspective. It first gives an overview of different feminist approaches to diversity and intersectionality. It explores the arguments for and against creating a democratic European Public Sphere and discusses the tensions between universal principles of equality at the one hand and concerns for inequalities and diversity of particular groups within and between particular national contexts at the other hand. It focuses at the tensions between the universal principles of equality and the principles of recognition ethnic diversity. Finally it looks at proposals to redesign the concept of citizenship beyond the nation state and to link feminist proposals for gender justice with frames for a multilayered trans-national citizenship.

The paper aims to contribute to debates about theoretical approaches and models to study gender and diversity in the public sphere in general and in particular The European Public Sphere (EPS). It also reflects on methodological frames and research strategies adopted to study the EPS with examples from my participation in two EU-projects, the VEIL- project (see: http://www.veil-project.eu/) and the EUROSPHERE-project (see: http://eurosphere.uib.no/ ).