So, am I in the sphere or not?

After last class, it was brought up that there was some confusion with the article. Although after we discussed the article I had a somewhat better understand of the subject, we were assigned to re-read the article and bring up questions that we had. I still have some confusion with the following issues:

1. My first major issue was just the way that Fraser worded everything. I would like to think that an author would WANT people to be able to understand everything that they're writing, yet with this everything is so much more wordy than necessary!!! Because the author wrote in such a way, I lost interest at multiple points, and it took me about four times as long to read the article because I just was not interested. I did survive though, clearly because I'm writing this now!

2. I'm somewhat confused with her statements about the first major point - being that people from different social classes are equal to talk. Sometimes I think that Fraser is saying that the discussion that Habermas wants to occur can happen, and other times I think that she says it cannot. Which side does she actually believe?

3. At first I didn't understand what exactly were considered private issues. Is it people's personal lives? Or is it things such as sexual abuse? I think that I've come to understand that "private" has to deal with private property in a market economy and people's literal sex lives. I'm not sure if this is exactly correct however.

4. In class on Monday, someone asked exactly what "democractic" meant. I always thought I had a general idea what it meant, and we even came up with some definitions - like being more democratic means being more for ALL the people, with the majority interests. However, I feel like in the context of having one public as more democratic is still somewhat confusing, and I hope maybe tomorrow we can go into more detail with this!

That's all for now - I hope that everybody else had more success with the re-reading :)
-Caitlyn