Role of Media in Formation of an Alternative Public Sphere for LGBTQ+ Community: The Indian perspective

Abstract

Jurgen Habermas’s public sphere belongs to the same theoretical family of civil society which offers a common platform for the representation of common interest in the public. In his book Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he emphases on the bourgeois public sphere which was perceived as a sphere where private people transcending their private preoccupations come together as public and creates an interactive body of citizens involved in rational-critical discourse addressing common purposes. Communicating with each other, social actors learn to share ideas and create a unified public. Their communication was marked by certain features, by

rationality, by disinterestedness, by irrelevance of inherited identities to their deliberation, and by rigorous separation of private and public spheres (Rudolph and Rudolph 2003). The Media and the Public Sphere promotes a deeper and more detailed understanding of the political process by foregrounding the multifaceted relationships between the media and the public discourse they constitute. It examines how the media co-create relationships of power, analyses the structure of these broad networks and illuminates the effects that different deliberative coalition types have on political debates. (Ajaya K. Sahoo, ed. 2006) Taking into account the growing social mobilizations, large-scale transformations in the society and polity, changes in the media scenario, booming of the social media and so on in last few decades, the paper looks into the issues of how the ‘civil public’ gets transformed into, what Habermas calls, the ‘political public’. How do the marginalized and subaltern groups in civil society use the language of rights to decentre domination, assert selfhood and chart out democratic discourses affecting the politics of everyday social life? And, how the morphology of the public sphere, which was restricted among the elites as an agency of upholding capitalist state hegemony (Gramsci) instead of mediating between civil society and the state (Habermas), has gone through a metamorphosis over time? Addressing such questions, the present paper tries to find the possibility of formation of an alternative public sphere for LGBTQ+ community in India and the probable role of media in doing so. The paper shall try to decode Nancy Fraser’s (1998) theory of social justice seeks to regenerate critical theory in a form fit for present dilemmas by developing a unique and powerful synthesis among (post)Marxism, feminism and poststructuralism. It interrogates key concepts in social and political thought and facilitates in-depth analyses of contemporary media scenario and the status of LGBTQ+ community in India and tries to articulate the possibility of formation of an alternative public sphere for them.