1
Describing Samuel Delany’s autobiography The Motion of Light in Water, feminist theorist
Joan Scott analyzes Delany’s description of his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. For
Delany, the public encounter with a multiplicity of gay men was transformative. Scott writes:
Watching the scene [in the bathhouse] establishes for Delany a fact that flew in the face of the
prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as isolated perverts, subjects gone awry.
The “apprehension of massed bodies” gave him…a “sense of political power.”
1
According to Scott, the issue of visibility is crucial to Delany’s project. Public witnessing became
an embodied form of breaking silence, a form of publicity that “challenges prevailing notions,
and opens new possibilities.” This politics of presence is understood as revealing something “that
existed but had been suppressed.”
2
Visibility, then, produced a shared sense of agency in
subjects who had historically found the public realm to be a site of silence, alienation, and
invisibility. The very act of shared public performance renders visible institutions and practices
that had previously been hidden from history. For Delany, it was the physical visibility of large
numbers of gay men that produced an exhilarating sense of agency — “a sense of participation in
a movement.”
3
Like Delany, Chicano and Puerto Rican activists have experienced public performance as
confirmation and revelation. Like other marginalized groups seeking empowerment, Latino
activists in the 1960s and ’70s shared the belief that to gather in the public realm was to claim it.
Through witnessing one another politically, movement participants produced a counter-discourse
to prevailing notions of Latino apathy and quiescence. The marches, fiestas, poetry, and teatro
events that characterized the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements gave activists a sense of
themselves as a people with agency.
Yet despite this legacy, for many advocates of participatory or “strong” democracy,
participation is understood in terms of deliberative practices that emphasize dialogue and debate
between citizens.
4
For these theorists, liberalism’s emphasis on representation, individualism,
and self-interest provides subjects with a rich language of rights but a rather thin language of
1
Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York:
Routledge, 1992) 22-23.
2
Scott 23.
3
Scott 23.
4
For a sampling of some of the most significant writings on deliberative democracy, see Benjamin Barber 1984,
Seyla Benhabib 1996, Joseph Bessette 1994, James Bohman 1996, John Dryzek 1990 and 2000, James Fishkin
1992, and Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson 1996.
Convention