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Since its inception, a core aspiration of deliberative democracy has been to enable more and better inclusion within democratic politics. In this article, we argue that deliberative democracy can achieve this aspiration only if it goes beyond verbal forms of communication and acknowledges the crucial role of non-verbal communication in expressing and exchanging arguments. The article develops a multidimensional approach to deliberative democracy by emphasizing the visual, sonic and physical dimensions of communication in public deliberation. We argue that non-verbal modes of communication can contribute to public deliberation when they (1) are used as part of reason-giving processes, (2) enable the inclusion of marginalized actors in public debates and (3) induce reflection and encourage new ways of thinking about the public controversies at hand.

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change.

To understand what digital democracy is, this article suggests looking at the individual level of democratic subjectivity. Who is the democratic subject and how is it constituted in digital democracy? It revisits the poststructuralist-inspired debate about cyberdemocracy in the 1990s, which conceptualized the democratic subject as disembodied discursive self, reifying through textuality in cyberspace. In contrast, current debates on new materialism offer novel perspectives with attention to the materiality of bodies and things. New materialist thought has been fruitfully incorporated for social interaction online, but they have yet to be applied to political participation. By discussing three examples of political online participation in which users materialize their classed, raced, and gendered bodies, this article contributes to a novel understanding of embodied democratic subjectivity in the digital age.

This essay asks how the democratic ideal of inclusion can be achieved in societies marked by power asymmetries along the lines of identity categories such as gender and race. It revisits debates of difference democracy of the 1990s, which promoted inclusion through a politics of presence of marginalized social groups. This strategy inevitably entails essentializing tendencies, confining the democratic subject within its physically embodied identity. Difference democrats did not take notice of the parallel emerging discourse on cyberfeminism exploring novel identity configurations on the Internet. This essay augments the politics of presence with digital identity reconfigurations. Neither difference democrats nor cyberfeminists distinguish between various participatory sites. Drawing on conceptions of participatory spaces from development studies and deliberative democracy, this essay generates a typology differentiating between empowered spaces such as parliaments, invited spaces such as citizens' assemblies, and the claimed spaces of social movements. The democratic functions these spaces fulfil are best facilitated by three different modes of identity performance: identity continuation, identity negation, and identity exploration. A pluralization of participatory sites and modes of identity performance facilitates inclusion while tackling the essentializing tendencies in difference democracy.

Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies—not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti—it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawing upon the diverse literature on anonymity in political participation, it explains anonymity as a highly context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere. The contradictory character of its core elements—identity negation and identity creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms. Anonymity affords (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. This contradictory character of anonymity's affordances illustrates the ambiguous role of anonymity in democracy.

This article develops the concept of cyborg activism as novel configuration of democratic subjectivity in the Information Age by exploring the online collectivity Anonymous as a prototype. By fusing elements of human/machine and organic/digital, the cyborg disrupts modern logics of binary thinking. Cyborg activism emerges as the reconfiguration of equality/hierarchy, reason/emotion and nihilism/idealism. Anonymous demonstrates how through the use of contingent and ephemeral digital personae hierarchies in cyborg activism prove more volatile than in face-to-face settings. Emotions appear as an essential part of a politics of passion, which enables pursuing laughter and joy, expressing anger and experiencing empowerment as part of a reasoned, strategic politics. Anonymous’ political content reconfigures nihilist sentiments, frustration and political disenchantment, on one hand, with idealist world views, on the other. This enables the cohabitation and partial integration of a great diversity of political claims rooted in various ideologies.