Finding a home in the public sphere, challenging the social representations of politics: A case study of McGill University’s Women in House Programme, 2001–2005

Abstract

This paper examines young Canadian women’s conceptions of political power through qualitative interviews with participants of the McGill University’s Women in House Programme, 2001–2005, which documented the women’s first-hand experiences of shadowing women parliamentarians. I examine the female students’ social representations of political power within the Parliamentary process, and notably, how their internalisation of the influence that gender plays in shaping their own interest in engaging in formal politics. In spite of high levels of political knowledge and direct exposure to the political system, these young women continue to accept the dominant political and social discourses that portray them as excluded from the public sphere on the grounds of their gender, age, and in some instances, ethnicity and social class. I also explore how young women conceptualise and understand the social networks, and forms of capital and resources which are associated with access to the elite political community.Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theory of subaltern counterpublics, I argue that young women are in need of women-only spaces such as the Women in House programme in order to develop the sites of dialogue and deliberation needed to create counter-discourses that will enable them to challenge the discursive representations of social power within contemporary Canadian political processes. This paper draws on social psychological approaches and makes an important empirical contribution to the political science literature about the engagement and public participation of an under-represented political group.