We take our understanding of the public sphere from Michael Warner, who, writing with Habermas in mind, attempts to theorize a rhetorically active public sphere, one that considers issues and debates them vigorously—if not always as “rationally” as Habermas intends. Indeed, Warner argues:

Public discourse…is poetic. By this I mean not just that it is self-organizing, a kind of entity created by its own discourse, or even that this space of circulation is taken to be a social entity, but that in order for this to happen all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate and it must attempt to realize that world through address. (113-4)

Warner’s public is embedded in and constructed out of discourse, and he argues that participation in public discourse must be rhetorically acute; that is, any rhetorical action must recognize how it either constitutes or exists in relation to a set of world views already in circulation in discourse. Put simply, a “public is poetic world making” (114), and any discursive activity within the public must recognize and situate itself rhetorically vis-à-vis the pre-existing projects of “world making.” Of course, most public lifeworlds are densely heterosexual, heteronormal—a situation we know all too well.

Warner’s distinction between publics/counterpublics notes how agency in the public sphere relies on being able to articulate and maintain the dominant lifeworld. This move toward maintenance explains the high level of activity around gay marriage issues, for instance; opponents of gay marriage attempt to preserve a particular view of what marriage is and how it should be defined, while proponents argue that gay relationships are often just like straight ones, so they should be labeled and understood as such—not just rhetorically, but in material reality. Indeed, the marriage debate offers a rich example of Warner’s assertion that “all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate.” If queers are to have agency within the dominant public sphere, they must address how that sphere characterizes itself to itself. In this case, queer lives become intelligible—one wants to say “legible”—only when they articulate themselves in the rhetoric of the dominant. That is, queers who claim marriage rights narrate their lives through the structures of the dominant public, the dominant lifeworld. Agency for queers, then, sometimes becomes possible in the dominant public sphere only to the extent to which they can position themselves rhetorically as both challenging and maintaining the lifeworld structures and narratives of the dominant culture. In this sense, then, rhetorical agency for many queers refracts a heterosexualized experience; we as queers must articulate ourselves and our desires in ways that coincide with a dominant “straight” culture—or risk being never heard or, worse, misunderstood and vilified, even attacked. Indeed, queer selves often only gain legibility in the larger public sphere to the extent that they mimic, as pale imitations, the heteronormal—we want to get married (check normal), we want to serve in the military (check normal), we want to join the status quo, helping to maintain it in the process.