Hidden Transcripts and Whisper Networks: The Subterranean Public Sphere and the Infrapolitics of Feminist Knowledge

This paper theorises the notion of a ‘subterranean public sphere’ and the 'infrapolitics' (Scott 1990) of feminist knowledge. Functioning as a clandestine ‘subaltern counterpublic’ (Fraser 1990), the ‘subterranean public sphere’ is a discursive space forced beneath and veiled from the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ (Habermas 1962/1989). Its formation intentionally or unintentionally protects knowledges against the threat of erasure, and protects knowers against the threat of violence, in contexts where having knowledge vulnerabilizes subjects to forms of repression. Drawing on James Scott's work on 'hidden transcripts', or the offstage discourses and practices of groups that secretly undermine power relations, this paper analyses whisper networks among feminist publics and the kind of everyday struggle that they embody. It argues that such networks enact an infrapolitics or a “wide variety of low-profile forms of resistance” and disguised “forms of insubordination” aimed at twarthing “the material appropriation of their labour, their production, and their property” (Scott 1990). Using the example of whisper networks among subordinated groups, this paper maps an instance of a feminist strategy for the formation of subterranean democratic networks and modes of communication necessary for surviving repressive conditions. The discussion is divided into the following sections: (1) Whisper Networks, (2) Scott’s account of Hidden Transcripts, and (3) Infrapolitics of Feminist Knowledge. It concludes by raising the question of whether such forms of infrapolitics are still possible in today’s age of technologically-optimized surveillance and algocratic data extraction.