Most people start with thank yous. I have to start with provisos: If one of the defining qualities of a woman in public life is instant name recognition, then all of you would be forgiven for asking Rahila – Who? I had the same reaction – when I was asked to participate in this panel – what moi?

So here I am feeling like the Great Pretender, someone who has always been more comfortable as a backroom girl, pontificating about a space to which I have only a peripheral connection. Which brings me to my first point about public life – visibility and our fields of vision. The moment any one of us sticks our head above the parapet, beyond the confines of our immediate friends and family, we enter that ill-defined space – the public space. But there are spaces within spaces.

When I started my journalistic career, as editor of Shakti, a Southall based Asian youth magazine, which was published bi-monthly if we got lucky, and sold perhaps 200 copies, I would have been known to my readership but would that have qualified me as a woman in public life? When I joined the editorial collective of Outwrite, a feminist and anti-imperialist newspaper, with a much larger readership, ditto – I would have figured in the field of vision of feminists who may not otherwise have come across me as editor of Shakti. So to qualify for this description as a woman in public life, if we are not to interpret it strictly as public appointment or presence in Parliament or local government, she has to straddle separate and overlapping communities defined by interest, gender, race, sexuality etc. Or she has to be visible in the national conversation which today often means – visible in the media.

But this public space is unfaithful, shifting in its loyalties, finding new voices, looking for the media savvy, photogenic, queen of the sound-bite, promoting the cult of the new but not anything that is radical enough to challenge the status quo in any fundamental way – this is the dialectic of the public space and the terms on which it is leased to us.

So I think it is less interesting to frame the question in terms of the barriers and ceilings that stop women getting into public life (although inevitably I will talk about that) because it should be less about individuals and more about the ideas they bring. We need to transform the shape of that public space and soften it up for more radical ideas to occupy centre stage.

via Rahila Gupta’s Speech at Feminism in London 2010

Came across this speech while looking/hoping for an online archive of Outwrite [being a political media and history nerd]. Gupta’s speech feels so relevant to current online dynamics though.