Politics of Emancipation: A Feminist Defence of Randomly Selected Political Representatives

The presence of women in elected assemblies has been argued to transform the political agenda so that it better addresses the needs or interests of women – a social group that has long suffered from structural oppression and domination. In this paper, I argue that feminists, rather than hoping for policy benefits of including women among the political elite, should challenge the division of political labour between professional politicians and "ordinary" citizens. More specifically, I suggest that political assemblies consisting of randomly selected citizens would better serve women's self-determination and emancipation. This is because a) citizen representatives would be more keen and capable than elected representatives to critique social norms and practices, b) the idea of citizen representatives better accommodates the idea that the personal is political, and c) the idea of citizen representatives acknowledges that political merit is a gendered, racialised, and class-based concept.