Post-democracy and gender: new paradoxes and old tensions

Colin Crouch's notion of 'post-democracy' has become a key notion for describing the current stage of democracy in western societies. Crouch argues that although modern democracies still maintain the facade of formal democratic principles, politics are increasingly shaped by political actors who lack any democratic legitimization. Taking up Crouch's notion of post-democracy as a useful concept for describing contemporary democracies, the paper aims to reveal the gendered impacts of post-democracy. The paper aims to prove that a feminist perspective broadens the scope of the critique of the current stage of democracy in western societies. The first part counters Crouch's argument that post-democracy needs to be conceptualized as decline from a formerly more democratic and inclusive form of democracy. Rather, from a feminist perspective also prior to the stage of post-democracy democracy was highly exclusive. This is highlighted along three dimensions - the construction of the political subject, the demos and the political. The second part highlights that post-democracy prolongs gendered exclusions and reconfigures the relationship between the political and the social. Taking up the three dimensions of the first part, the second part explores how the constitutive limitations of western democracy continue to exist in a modified way within post-democracy.