Feminist Deliberation as Practice: Reconfiguring Democratic Mechanisms Across Space, Time, and Digital Arenas

Abstract

This article examines feminist deliberation as an evolving democratic mechanism that reshapes deliberative democracy across spatial, temporal, and epistemic dimensions. First, it offers a multilingual, cross-regional analysis of feminist scholarship from the Global North and South, showing how diverse epistemic traditions redefine deliberation. Second, it proposes a temporal framework with four phases: early feminist critiques of participation and legitimacy (1980s-1990s), relational and affective expansions (2000s-2010s), insurgent and territorial practices (2010s-2020s), and conflictual, spatial, and digital extensions (2020s). Third, it identifies feminist deliberative practices operating across scales, from everyday interactions to collective and digital action. Using a qualitative interpretative methodology, the study treats feminist theory as both conceptual and empirical material. It finds that feminist deliberation goes beyond institutional dialogue, functioning instead as a distributed, relational process embedded in everyday life, care, and political struggle. It thus emerges as both a methodological lens and a political practice for transforming democratic life.