Editorial | Open Access
Contested Regimes of (In)Visibility in Gendered Public Spheres
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Abstract: Research on gendered public spheres has examined how struggles over gender equality, recognition, and equal representation unfold across changing communication environments. These struggles involve competing actors and claims, including feminist and queer mobilization as well as anti-gender contestation, but they are also shaped by how and under what conditions actors become visible, remain less visible, or strategically manage their public exposure. This thematic issue conceptualizes gendered public spheres as contested regimes of (in)visibility and brings together contributions that address three closely connected dimensions: the structural conditions that shape visibility; the situated agency through which actors navigate them; and the relational production of visibility across networks, publics, and national boundaries. Together, the contributions show that visibility is neither inherently empowering nor always the desired outcome, while invisibility cannot simply be equated with exclusion or political irrelevance. The thematic issue contributes to research on feminist and anti-gender mobilization, platformized and networked publics, strategic (in)visibility, and the relationship between visibility and influence in contemporary gendered public spheres.
Keywords: counterpublics; feminism; gendered public spheres; influence; invisibility; networked publics; visibility
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© Stefan Wallaschek, Mareike Bauer. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.