Gender Asymmetries: Visibility, with what Power?

Abstract

Thirty years after the Beijing Declaration, power asymmetries persist that limit women’s access to the public sphere and full citizenship. Starting from feminist criticism of the Habermasian model and the notion of counterpublics, this contribution distinguishes between integrative visibility - presence that legitimizes the order without changing it - and transformative visibility, which affects access, representation, and redistribution. The reflection that precedes this contribution asks: when does visibility produce effective transformation? The rhetoric of emancipation, individualized and managerialized, can play the role of co-optation devices. On the media side, platforms, understood as organizational infrastructures, not only disseminate but also configure audiences and priorities, favoring regimes of controlled inclusion measured in metrics of attention rather than transformative outcomes. Given that increased visibility does not coincide with a redistribution of power, it follows that what is at stake is not ‘being there’, but rather rearticulating the rules of representability (who speaks, where, with what resources) in order to convert visibility into institutional capacity.