Radical Feminist K of Privacy
Strategy Sheet
Contributors: Cameron, Dhruv, Elliot, Firdows, Jay, Krishna, Maretu, Meghna, Nick,
Schecky, Shivy, Spencer (Extra shout out to Dhruv Sudesh for organization!!)
Welcome back to the 80’s where the side pony ruled and privacy sucked…
The radical feminist critique of privacy indicts the notion that the state should not
interfere in private lives to protect socially disenfranchised groups. The public/Private
dichotomy is deeply entrenched in liberal society. When the state decides to expand
privacy as a legal protection, it expands the zone of state noninterference. These
zones then become an elitist “free-for-all”; those without power are still constrained
by gendered, cultural, economic, and racial social norms. Thus, the state of
noninterference is not truly free-for-all, but gives free reign to the socially powerful.
This critique primarily focuses on the subjugation of women and the expansion of
patriarchy when the legal concept of privacy is expanded.
Go, fight, win. –BT Lab
Privacy K Neg
1nc
Privacy rhetoric creates a zone of noninterference, which normalizes patriarchal
domination -- surveillance is merely a tool of this dynamic.
Roth 99-- Roth is Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona
(Louise, "The Right to Privacy Is Political: Power, the Boundary Between Public and
Private, and Sexual Harassment," Law and Social Inquiry, Winter, 1999, 24 Law & Soc.
Inquiry 45 , JSTOR)//KM
The rhetoric of rights to noninterference in private matters is embedded in the legal system, the
labor market, and culture, even though the public/private boundary itself is arbitrary and changing. The most recent shift to
defining privacy as an area of every person's life moves it to a micro level. If this boundary exists
for each individual and is not related to stratification, then all individuals should be equally able to protect
this privacy. However, control over the discursive boundary, and protection of privacy, differ by power.
This shift to an individual-level boundary is where the issue of sexual harassment (in the form of unwanted sexual attention or sexual
coercion) is related to the public/private boundary in two ways. First, it challenges the boundary itself, because it represents the
occurrence of "private" (sexual) behavior in the "public sphere" of work and education. Second, sexual harassment is an issue that
reveals the importance of social power in defining and defending one's privacy. As a communication issue, sexual harassment
represents the extreme on a continuum of communication between status unequals: communication that manifests power and has
implications for defining one's privacy. Feminist scholars
have revealed that noninterference in the
"private" realm has the effect of reinforcing power and powerlessness (MacKinnon 1989). Formal
equality fails to engender real equality, and even reinforces inequality, because power relations from the
public realm operate with impunity in the arena of nonintervention. In guaranteeing a right to
privacy in the private sphere to all citizens, the liberal state legitimates an area in which
inequalities of power based on resources, knowledge, and symbolic attributions can act with
impunity (MacKinnon 1989; Polan 1993; Hoff 1991). The development of a feminist critique of the legal and ideological division of
private and public, of personal and political, led to the feminist mantra, "The personal is political." Not only is the
personal political in the sense that the private sphere contains power relations that mirror those
outside it, but systemic power also influences the right to privacy. The arbitrariness of the
discursive boundary between public and private subjects it to the influence of social power. All
forms of social power are reinforced by institutional disciplines, including law, which justify the
perpetuation of inequality within a juridicosocial structure that formally upholds ideals of
equality (Foucault 1977). The disciplines act as systems of micro-power that support the status quo by naming
the world from the perspective of those in power such that the standpoint of the powerless is
silenced because it cannot be expressed using available language (Foucault 1977, 1978). Furthermore,
disciplines and their accompanying discourses justify inequality as a consequence of empirically
observable individual differences. Such differences are observed and documented through the
application of surveillance of the less powerful by the more powerful. Through surveillance, "the disciplines characterize,
classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary,
disqualify and invalidate" (Foucault 1977, 223). Thus, disciplines validate
social, economic, and political
inequality within a context of ideological egalitarianism by attributing inequalities to the observable
attributes of individuals rather than to structural processes that differentially affect individuals depending on
their position in the social order. Surveillance is applied most vigorously to those with the least ability to
define the boundaries between their private and public lives.6 Those with more power have
greater access and opportunity to use surveillance on the less powerful by monitoring their day-to-day activities
with the assistance of video cameras, guards, police surveillance, and observation by credentialed "experts" whose research is
funded by various institutions (Foucault 1977, 1978; Davis 1990; McIntosh 1988). At the same time, the powerful protect their
power by preventing the less powerful from doing the same (Foucault 1977), partially accomplished by residing in communities and
belonging to associations that are insulated from public access (Davis 1990). These
dynamics are often a prominent
feature of battering relationships, and are also particularly evident on a large scale in racial
domination in the United States, accomplished by greater social and police surveillance (and
incarceration) of nonwhites, especially African Americans (Collins 1991; Davis 1990). Facility of surveillance is often built into
architecture or urban planning (Davis 1990) or into the arrangement of work space within organizations. It is also applied using the
disciplines of science, medicine, and law (Foucault 1977). Sexuality
is another arena in which power and
surveillance operate (Foucault 1978). Foucault argues that a science of sexuality, and truth claims about sexuality's link
to identity and virtue, are discourses that exert power and create docile bodies. Since the seventeenth century,
sexuality has been exploited as the means for finding out the truth about a person. To expose or control someone's sexuality is a
means of exerting power, while being able to protect one's own sexuality from exposure and scrutiny is an expression of power as
well as a means of preserving it (Foucault 1978). It is through this relationship between sexuality and power that sexual harassment
operates. Sexual harassment of the "come on" type is a means of controlling and/or exposing someone's sexuality. Consequently,
sexual harassment and power, definitions of sexual harassment, and typologies of harassment have been developed through the
theoretical and empirical literature on the subject. This
literature can then be connected to power dynamics in
communication, and to the definition of privacy as a circumscribed area of noninterference in
each individual's life. Sexual harassment is an abusive means of exercising power through communication that highlights the
target's gender and/or sexuality.
Patriarchy causes nuclear annihilation – it necessitates militarism
Spretnak 89 - MA in English from University of California, Berkeley, (Charlene, “Exposing
Nuclear Phallacies,” 1989, p. 53-54) //DS
Women and men can live together and can relate to other societies in any number of
cultural configurations, but ignorance of the configurations themselves locks a populace
into blind adherence to the status quo. In the nuclear age, such unexamined acceptance may be fatal as certain
cultural assumptions in our own society are pushing us closer and closer to war. Since a major war could now
easily bring on massive annihilation of almost unthinkable proportions, why are discussions
in our national forums addressing this madness of the nuclear arms race limited to matters
of hardware and statistics? A more comprehensive analysis is needed-unless, as the doomsayers claim, we
collectively harbor a death wish and no not really want to look closely at dynamics propelling us steadily toward the brink of
The cause of nuclear arms proliferation is militarism. What is the cause of
militarism? The traditional militarist explanation is that the “masters of war” in the military-industrial complex profit
extinction.
enormously from defense contracts and other war preparations. A capitalist economy periodically requires the economic boon
that large-scale government spending, capitol investment, and worker sacrifice produce during a crisis of war. In addition,
American armed forces, whether nuclear or conventional, are stationed worldwide to protect the status quo, which requires
vast and interlocking American corporate interests. Suck an economic analysis alone in inadequate, as the recent responses to
patriarchies. Militarism
and warfare are continual features of patriarchal society because they reflect and instill
patriarchal values and fulfill essential needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context of patriarchal
the nuclear arms race that ignore the cultural orientation of the nations involved: They are
conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward reducing their impact and preserving life on Earth.
Reject liberal privacy – make the personal political -- exploding power inequities and
breaking down masculine aggression
Mackinnon 83 - Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University Of Michigan Law School, Visiting professor of
law at Harvard Law School... (Charlotte; “Privacy vs. Equality: Beyond Roe vs. Wade”;
http://politicalscience.tamu.edu/documents/faculty/MacKinnon-Privacy_v_Equality.pdf )//KM
In the context of a sexual critique of gender inequality, abortion promises to women sex with men on the same reproductive
terms as men have sex with women, So long as women do not control access to our sexuaIity abortion facilitates women’s
heterosexual availability. In other words, under
conditions of gender inequality, sexual liberation in this
sense does not free women; it frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion removes the one
remaining legitimized reason that women have had for refusing sex besides the headache. As Andrea Dworkin put it, analyzing
male ideology on abortion, “Getting laid was at stake” 17 The Playboy Foundation has supported abortion rights from one; it
continues to, even with shrinking disposable funds, on a level of priority comparable to that of its opposition to censorship.
Privacy doctrine is an ideal vehicle for this process. ‘the
liberal ideal of the private—and privacy as an ideal has been
so long as the public does not interfere, autonomous individuals
interact freely and equally conceptually, this private is hermetic. It means that which is
inaccessible to, unaccountable to, unconstructed by anything beyond itself. By definition, it is
not part of or conditioned by anything systematic or outside of it. It is personal, intimate,
autonomous, particular, individual, the original source and final outpost of the self, gender
neutral. It is, in short, defined by everything that feminism reveals women have never been
allowed to be or to have, and everything that women have been equated with and defined in terms of men ability to
have. To complain in public of inequality within it contradicts the liberal definition of the private. In
this view, no act of the state contributes to—hence should properly participate in—shaping the internal
alignments of the private or distributing its internal forces. Its inviolability by the state, framed
as an individual right, presupposes that the private is not already an arm of the state. In this
scheme, intimacy is implicitly thought to guarantee symmetry of power. Injuries arise in
violating the private sphere, not within and by and because of it. In private, consent tends to be
presumed. It is true that a showing of coercion voids this presumption. One would allow force in private—the “why doesn’t
in liberal terms—holds that,
she leave” question asked of battered women—- is a question given its urgency by the social meaning of the private as a
sphere of choice. But for women the
measure of the intimacy has been the measure of the
oppression. This is why feminism has had to explode the private.
This is why
feminism
has seen the personal as the political . The private is the public for those for whom the
personal is the political in this sense, there is no private, either normatively or empirically.
Feminism confronts the fact that women pave no privacy to lose or to guarantee. We are not
inviolable. Our sexuality is not only violable, it is—hence, we are—seen in and as our violation. To confront the
fact that we have no privacy is to confront the intimate degradation of women
as the public order . In this light, a right to privacy looks like an injury got up as a gift. Freedom
from public intervention coexists uneasily with any right that requires social preconditions to be
meaningfully delivered. For example, if inequality is socially pervasive and enforced, equality will require intervention,
not abdication, to be meaningful. But the right to privacy is not thought to require social change. It is not
even thought to require any social preconditions, other than nonintervention by the public. The
point of this for the abortion cases is not that indecency—which was the specific barrier to effective choice in Harris—is well
within the public power to remedy, nor that the state is exempt in issues of the distribution of wealth. The point is rather that
Roe v. Wade presumes that government nonintervention into the private sphere promotes a woman’s freedom of choice.
When the alternative is jail, there is much to be said for this argument. But the Harris result sustains the ultimate meaning of
privacy in Roe:
women are guaranteed by the public no more than what we can get in private—that
is, what we can extract through our intimate associations with men. Women with privileges get
rights.
Links
Privacy
Legal language constructs zones of privacy- reinforcing male privilege
Schneider 91-- Director of the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship
Program, Staff Attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and a Staff
Attorney with the Rutgers Law School-Newark Constitutional Litigation Clinic,
(Elizabeth, Violence of Privacy, The Symposium: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, 23 Conn. L. Rev. 973,
1990-1991, p. 976-978,
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/conlr23&collection=journals&id=987&men_hide=false&men_tab=citn
av)//MG
Although
a dichotomous view of the public sphere and the private sphere has some
heuristic value and considerable rhetorical power, the dichotomy is overdrawn. The
notion of a sharp demarcation between public and private has been widely rejected by feminist and Critical Legal Studies
scholars. There
is no realm of personal and family life that exists totally separate from
the reach of the state. The state defines both the family, the so-called private sphere,
and the market, the so-called public sphere. “Private” and “public” exist on a continuum. Thus, in the
so-called private sphere of domestic and family life, which is purportedly immune
from law, there is always the selective application of law. Significantly, this selective application of
law invokes “privacy” as a rational for immunity in order to protect male domination. For example, when the police
do not respond to a battered woman’s call for assistance, or when a civil court
refuses to evict her assailant, the women is relegated to self-help, while the man who
beats her receives the law’s tacit encouragement and support. Indeed, we can see this pattern in
recent legislative and prosecutorial efforts to control women’s conduct during pregnancy in the form of “fetal” protection laws.
These laws are premised on the notion that women’s childbearing capacity, and pregnancy itself, subjects women to public
regulation capacity, and pregnancy itself, subjects women to public regulation and control. Thus, pregnant battered women
may find themselves facing criminal prosecution or drinking liquor, but the man who battered them is not prosecuted. The
rhetoric of privacy
that has insulated the female world for the legal order sends an
important ideological message to the rest of society. It devalues women and their
functions and says that women are not important enough to merit legal regulation.
This message is clearly communicated when particular relief is withheld. By declining to punish a man for inflicting injuries on
his wife, for example, the law implies she is his property and he is free to control her as he sees fit. Women’s work is
discredited when the law refuses to enforce the man’s obligation to support his wife, since it implies she makes no
contribution worthy of support. Similarly, when courts decline to enforce contracts that seek to limit or specify the extend of
the wife’s services, the law implies that household work is not real work in the way that the type of work subject to contract in
the public sphere is real work. These
are important messages, for denying woman’s humanity
and the value of her traditional work are key ideological components in maintaining
woman’s subordinate status. The message of women’s inferiority is compounded by
the totality of the law’s absence from the private realm. In our society, law is for business and other
important things. The fact that the law in general claims to have so little bearing on
women’s day-to-day concerns reflects and underscores their insignificance. Thus, the
legal order’s overall contribution to the devaluation of women is greater than the
sum of the negative messages conveyed by individual legal doctrines.
Language of domestic privacy justifies subjugation of women – legal decreases
in surveillance are not sufficient
Fraser ‘90 - Nancy Fraser is an American critical theorist, currently the Professor of
Political and Social Science and philosophy at The New School in New York City (Nancy,
“Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy, 1990,)//SC
In general, critical theory needs to take a harder, more critical look at the
terms "private" and "public." These terms,
not simply straightforward designations of societal spheres; they are cultural classifications and
rhetorical labels. In political discourse, they are powerful terms that are frequently deployed to
delegitimize some interests, views, and topics and to valorize others. This brings me to two other senses of
after all, are
privacy, which often function ideologically to delimit the boundaries of the public sphere in ways that disadvantage subordinate
social groups. These
are sense 5) pertaining to private property in a market economy; and sense 6)
pertaining to intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life. Each of these senses is at the
center of a rhetoric of privacy that has historically been used to restrict the universe of legitimate public
contestation. The rhetoric of domestic privacy seeks to exclude some issues and interests from
public debate by personalizing and/or familiarizing them; it casts these as private-domestic or personal-familial
matters in contradistinction to public, political matters. The rhetoric of economic privacy, in contrast, seeks to exclude
some issues and interests from public debate by economizing them; the issues in question here are cast as
impersonal market imperatives or as "private" ownership prerogatives or as technical problems for managers and planners, all in
contradistinction to public, political matters. In both cases, the
result is to enclave certain matters in specialized
discursive arenas and thereby to shield them from general public debate and contestation. This
usually works to the advantage of dominant groups and individuals and to the disadvantage of their
subordinates.35 If wife battering, for example, is labelled a "personal" or "domestic" matter and if public discourse about this
phenomenon is canalized into specialized institutions associated with, say, family law, social work, and the sociology and psychology
of "deviance," then this serves to reproduce gender dominance and subordination. Similarly, if questions of workplace democracy
are labelled "economic" or "managerial" problems and if discourse about these questions is shunted into specialized institutions
associated with, say, "industrial relations" sociology, labor law, and "management science," then this serves to perpetuate class (and
usually also gender and race) dominance and subordination. This
shows once again that the lifting of formal
restrictions on public sphere participation does not suffice to ensure inclusion in practice. On the
contrary, even after women and workers have been formally licensed to participate, their participation may be hedged by
conceptions of this.
Rethinking the Public Sphere, economic privacy, and domestic privacy that
delimit the scope of debate. These notions, therefore, are vehicles through which gender and class
disadvantages may continue to operate sub textually and informally, even after explicit, formal
restrictions have been rescinded.
Liberal notion of public/private dichotomy is primary obstacle to equality
Kelly ’03 -- Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at UCONN
(Kristin A., Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy, ed. By K. Kelly. P. 48-49)//FM
Likewise, the starting point of
liberal feminist theories about how to alter the public / private
division is not women but, rather, the “liberal individual.” As prior discussions demonstrate, liberal
feminist conceptualizations vary regarding the meaning of women’s individuality and the
significance of social context to its free realization. Historic changes and contemporary controversies mean
that it is extremely difficult to pinpoint the liberal feminist position on the public/private dichotomy. Still, even within this
there remains within liberal feminism an abiding and central focus on the issue of
what we can do as a society to ensure that all individuals in our society have the
opportunity to grow to their full potential. Significantly, although the particular concerns associated with
being female are certainly considered by liberal feminists, their question is not, “What do women need in
order to maximize their potential as individuals?” Rather, within these theories it is generally
assumed that once women overcome the gender roles that have oppressed them, that
special attention to their status “as women” can be left behind. In fact, as we have seen, one of the
major criticisms that liberal feminists have of the public / private split is that it artificially
diversity,
exaggerates gender differences. The resulting absence of embodied women in the liberal analysis of and solutions
to the public / private split is the basis for some of the strongest criticism that radical feminists have of this position. For
MacKinnon has argued that the “abstracted individual” upon whom liberal
theories are premised are (upon closer examination) male individuals writ large and, therefore, such
theories do not speak to women’s interests at all. From MacKinnon’s perspective, the best way to
avoid the irrelevance that accompanies such abstractions is to explicitly make women
central. This is accomplished by a singular focus on the fundamental characteristic that has
historically differentiated women from men: their sex. It is the sexual act and its
consequences (that is, pregnancy) that have enabled men to dominate women since the
beginning of time. The only way to liberate women is to confront the implicit oppression of
all heterosexual sexual relations and activities by exposing their political nature. Thus,
according to MacKinnon’s radical analysis, because the liberal distinction between public and private
functions to construct sex as an intimate (and therefore apolitical) activity, it should be
approached by feminists as a powerful obstacle to women’s freedom that should be
challenged.
example, Catharine
Right to privacy legitimizes inequality, preventing effective state action
Lever 97 - Associate Professor of Normative Political Theory in the Department of
Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland. (Annabelle; “A Democratic perception of Privacy”;
http://alever.net/DOCS/A%20Democratic%20Conception%20of%20Privacy.pdf)/
/KM
MacKinnon’s first objection to the right to privacy is that privacy is the right to be let alone, or to
be free from state action. Because privacy gives individuals rights to be let alone by the state,
she argues, it leaves the powerful free to oppress the vulnerable without fear of state scrutiny
and accountability. Though the right to privacy limits the concerted use of state power to crush any particular individual,
she believes, it promotes individualized forms of oppression which are incompatible with the
freedom and equality of individuals. Putting her thesis in succinct polemical form, she claims that the right to
privacy enables men to oppress women one by one. MacKinnon notes that liberals believe that the right to
privacy is necessary to protect the freedom and equality of individuals. Liberals claim that privacy protects the legitimate
differences between individuals because it gives them the right to be let alone by the state. In this way, liberals believe, the
autonomy of individuals is secured, and individuals are, then, free to cooperate together as equals, despite their differences.
MacKinnon, however, believes that the case for a right to privacy rests on a basic error. It
presupposes, she argues, that state action is the primary threat to the freedom and equality of
individuals and ignores the fact that state action may be necessary to secure these.20 We only
ensure the freedom and equality of individuals by leaving them alone, if they are already free
and equal to begin with. So, the right to privacy only protects the freedom and equality
of individuals if they are already free and equal . If not, state action might be necessary to secure these
goods and so individuals would have no right to be let alone by the state. This possibility is wrongly precluded by liberal
justifications of privacy, MacKinnon believes.21 As a result, she argues, the
right to privacy protects the
coercion and subordination of some individuals to others, while claiming to protect
the freedom and equality of all.
MacKinnon, then, believes that
liberals are wrong to imagine
that state action is the principal or only obstacle to individual rights . According to
MacKinnon, poverty, different bodily powers and the legacy of past inequality can all provide
more potent obstacles to individual autonomy than state action, and state action could remove or
substantially alleviate these.22 For example, women may be unable to prevent conception and pregnancy though the state
does not prohibit contraceptive use, because they are ignorant of the relevant biological facts or of their right to use
contraceptives. They may be prevented by poverty, youth, geographical location and the opposition of others, from using
contraceptives even if they want to. They may be discouraged from using contraceptives though they want to prevent
pregnancy, because contraceptive use has a social meaning which women “did not create” - namely, that one is “loose”, has no
moral standards, is willing to have sexual intercourse with any man. Because women cannot control these interpretations of
contraceptive use, and these make it more difficult for women successfully to refuse sex with men, MacKinnon notes that
women may be unwilling to use contraceptives, though otherwise they would do so. Hence, MacKinnon maintains that the
right to privacy justifies inequality because it assumes that individuals are free and equal when they are not. She uses the Hyde
Amendment and Harris v. McRae to illustrate and support these claims. The Hyde Amendment, which has passed Congress
each year since 1976, limits the use of Federal Funds to reimburse the costs of abortions under the Medicaid program of health
care for the poor. Initially, it allowed Federal funding for abortions following from incest and rape as well as for lifethreatening pregnancies.23 MacKinnon believes that the Hyde Amendment supposed that women could be held responsible
for becoming pregnant, because they could refuse to have sex with men, and could use contraceptives to prevent pregnancy.
Thus, it allowed state funding only in “exceptional” circumstances: in cases of rape, or in life-threatening emergencies.24
Similarly, Harris, in holding the Hyde Amendment constitutional, assumed that poor women can be held responsible for their
poverty, that they could have chosen not to be poor. Both, in short, ignored the structural causes of pregnancy and poverty
which women face, through no fault of their own, and which they cannot avoid or change without state aid. “It is not
inconsistent, then, that framed as a privacy right, a woman’s decision to abort would have no claim on public support and
would genuinely not be seen as burdened by that deprivation”, MacKinnon concludes. Recognizing that the state cannot wholly
prevent pregnancy from rape or contraceptive failure, and that it cannot ensure that men as well as women can become
pregnant, MacKinnon assumes that the state can, nonetheless, prevent a woman’s sexual capacities from becoming the source
of particular disadvantage and indignity. The state can shape the circumstances in which women conceive, bear children and
have abortions, so that these do not, as they now do, disadvantage women because of their sex. But
this, she believes,
the right to privacy prevents, by wishing away sexual inequality and coercion. Because it sets the
limits to legitimate state action, the right to privacy allows social differences which undermine
the freedom and equality of individuals. Far from protecting the legitimate differences between
individuals, as liberals claim, MacKinnon concludes, the right to privacy protects
illegitimate differences between individuals and so justifies the exploitation and
intimidation of women by men. As MacKinnon puts it, the right to privacy means that
“women with privileges get rights”.
Privacy rights reinforces traditional gender roles, promoting the degradation of
women
Lever 97 - Associate Professor of Normative Political Theory in the Department of
Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland. (Annabelle; “A Democratic perception of Privacy”;
http://alever.net/DOCS/A%20Democratic%20Conception%20of%20Privacy.pdf)//KM
The association of privacy and intimacy provides the grounds for MacKinnon’s second objection to
the right to privacy. Whereas her first objection is that privacy rights associate freedom and equality with the absence of
state regulation, her second objection is that they associate freedom and equality with the maledominated family and with heterosexual intimacy. Thus, MacKinnon believes, “It is probably no
coincidence that the very things feminism regards as central to the subjection of women – the
very place, the body; the very relations, heterosexual; the very activities, intercourse and
reproduction; the very feelings, intimate – form the core of what is covered by privacy doctrine.
From this perspective, the legal concept of privacy can and has shielded the place of battery, marital rape, and women’s
exploited labor; has preserved the central institutions whereby women are deprived of identity, autonomy, control and selfdefinition…”
Liberals believe that privacy protects the autonomy and equality of individuals by
enabling them to form personal associations whose terms are largely regulated by
themselves.25 In this way privacy rights allow individuals to pursue their personal good, and
enable individuals to know together goods which they could not know alone (to paraphrase
Sandel’s happy phrase)26 . This, liberals hope, will give individuals equal access to things which
are valuable, but which would be devalued or unavailable were choice prohibited.27 For example,
mutual care, love, affection and friendship, trust and support seem to be fundamental human goods, and ones which depend
on the voluntary participation of individuals for their being and sustenance. But because they are vulnerable to interference
from others and, particularly, from the state, liberals think that the state can only ensure these goods for individuals indirectly.
By protecting intimate, sexual and familial relationships by privacy rights, then, they hope that
the state can protect indirectly what it cannot ensure directly, and can, thus, further the
happiness as well as the freedom and equality of individuals. However, MacKinnon claims, the
degree of intimacy has been “the measure of the oppression” of women by men.28 The liberal
case for protecting intimate relationships, she believes, presumes that the state has no legitimate interest in
setting the terms of personal associations, or regulating them, in order to exclude exploitative,
damaging or unjust associations. It supposes that intimacy precludes exploitation and injustice
and, thus, that the state has no legitimate interest in regulating the internal relations of intimate
associations: “... intimacy is implicitly thought to guarantee symmetry of power. Injuries arise in violating the private
sphere, not within and by and because of it”. These premises, MacKinnon believes, are mistaken. For sexual
inequality forces women into disadvantageous and exploitative associations with men. As Okin and
others have noted, women are expected to marry, to have children and to be the primary caretakers
of these.29 They are supposed to devote themselves to the care and fulfillment of others, rather
than of themselves. Such social expectations shape the treatment and self-images of women
from infancy, and shape, therefore, their opportunities for learning, work and for personal
satisfaction and enjoyment in our society. The result is that women are encouraged to choose a course of life that
makes them dependent on men for their well-being, and face a wide variety of obstacles to doing otherwise.30 In particular,
they face the obstacle presented by men who endorse this perception of women, or resent, fear, or are indifferent to the
pursuit of independence by women.31 Moreover, MacKinnon
argues, it is a mistake to believe that
intimacy secures the choice and well-being of individuals, and thus assures mutuality in
relationships. Intimacy, in itself, need not counter-act the egoism, misperception of the worth of
others and oneself, which leads to injustice. On the contrary, it may allow these free play and
intensify injustice.32 As both Mill and MacKinnon observe, intimacy may increase the pressures
on women to behave in ways that please or flatter men, or which support their often
unconscious sense of what is owed them by women, because they are men. Intimacy with men, in
short, may increase the pressure on women to be subservient, passive and self-sacrificing, rather than alleviating this pressure
as liberals expect. Thus, MacKinnon maintains, “When the law of privacy restricts intrusions into intimacy, it bars changes in
control of that intimacy. The existing distribution of power and resources within the private sphere will be precisely what the
law of privacy exists to protect”. So, privacy perpetuates sexual inequality and unfreedom, according to MacKinnon, by hiding
and justifying oppression because it is intimate and chosen. By
protecting existing forms of intimate
association, privacy rights suppress legitimate differences between individuals over sex-roles,
the choice of sexual partner, the conduct of sexual and familial relations. By perpetuating the
subordination of women to men in the name of intimacy, privacy rights promote “the intimate
degradation of women as the public order”. By endorsing oppressive and exploitative
relationships because individuals commonly accept these, privacy rights militate against
alternatives. For they make sexually egalitarian relationships – whether heterosexual or
homosexual – appear aberrant, unreasonable, perverse. Thus, privacy rights inhibit and
undercut the quest for better ways of relating to others, of caring for, and loving them, as
equals.
Public/private dichotomy depoliticizes injustice and inequality,
privileging the voices of men over women
Lever 97 - Associate Professor of Normative Political Theory in the Department of
Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland. (Annabelle; “A Democratic perception of Privacy”;
http://alever.net/DOCS/A%20Democratic%20Conception%20of%20Privacy.pdf)//KM
MacKinnon’s third reason for believing that privacy is incompatible with equality is
that privacy rights endorse and maintain the public/private distinction, or the
distinction between the political and personal. But this distinction, she claims, is
precisely what feminists have had to “explode” in order to press their claims for
sexual justice. The public/private distinction distinguishes the political from the
personal in ways that privilege the interests, voices and persons of men, over those
of women. Hence, feminists have insisted, the personal is political, in order to show
the connection between individual acts of sexual violence and exploitation and the
way that our society creates and distributes political power. In liberal thought the
right to privacy is meant to ensure that the uses of state power are determined by
impersonal or neutral means. This, it is thought, is necessary if state power is to be
justified and compatible with the freedom and equality of individuals.34 By
requiring individuals to distinguish between the personal and the political, the
right to privacy is supposed to ensure that the uses of state power are determined
by the common interest of citizens rather than by the whims, caprice and prejudice
of the powerful. By protecting the personal interests of citizens from political
decision-making, the public/private distinction is supposed to encourage fearless
participation in public life even by the relatively powerless or the socially
unpopular.35 Protection for the right to privacy and the public/private distinction,
then, are meant to be evidence of a state’s commitment to impartiality between the
competing interests of citizens and to the freedom and equality of individuals in
public and private life. In this way, liberals believe, the public/private distinction
can secure the foundations of constitutional democracy and avert the evils of
absolute government. According to MacKinnon, there are two main difficulties
with this picture of the public/private distinction. First, it presupposes that the
private is not already political. Second, it presumes that the personal/political
distinction is, itself, neutral and impersonal. Neither, she claims, is the case. So, far
from promoting freedom and equality, she thinks, the public/private distinction
perpetuates sexual inequality and places precisely those beliefs, practices and
institutions which most contribute to sexual inequality, beyond democratic
accountability and redress. The public/private distinction “is at once an ideological
division that lies about women's shared experience and that mystifies the unity
among the spheres of women’s violation. It is a very material division that keeps
the private beyond public redress and depoliticizes women's subjection within it”.
The private is political, MacKinnon argues, because its existence depends on
support from government, without which there would be no legal protection of
privacy.36 Moreover, government’s maintenance of privacy rights is no more
politically neutral than its other acts – for example, raising and spending taxes, or
regulating the press and communications media.37 In each case, the state
distributes political power – or the ability to determine how the state is governed –
by its grant of rights. In each case, it does so for reasons that are at least as likely to
be influenced by political calculation – or calculations of what will be advantageous
to those with power – as by convictions about the justice or goodness of one course
of action rather than another. 38 So, if open and accountable, governments are
meant to protect citizens from the abuse of state power by those who have it, we
should abandon privacy rights in the interests of democratic government. Absent
the belief that the private is not political, MacKinnon argues, the rationale for
privacy rights advanced by liberals collapses, and privacy can be seen for what it is:
a threat to the freedom and equality of citizens. Moreover, MacKinnon believes, it
is untrue that the personal/political distinction is neutral between the interests of
persons and provides, therefore, an impersonal guide to resolving conflicts
between them. What is considered personal is, therefore, considered unsuitable for
political discussion and for collective action.39 But this means that sexual
inequality and injustice can be dismissed as a personal matter, as not appropriately
political.40 Thus, the public/private distinction, according to MacKinnon,
depoliticizes sexual injustice and inequality, leaving its victims without effective
means for enlisting the help of others in defense of their rights. According to
MacKinnon, the public/private distinction licenses two different, but related,
results. First, it implies that social inequality is a personal matter – that it is the
nature of particular individuals or social groups, not their circumstances and the
behavior of others, which are responsible for their disadvantaged social position.
Second, it implies that, though in the public realm the state must aggressively
combat prejudice against individuals, in private individuals may join sexist or racist
associations if they so want, or read pornography though this is illegal in public. In
each case, by supposing that our personalities can be more or less unaffected by our
circumstances, the state allows prejudice to flourish and, with it, the coercion and
subordination of individuals. Harris and Bowers v. Hardwick, MacKinnon believes,
support these claims. In Harris the Supreme Court held that the government was
not responsible for the poverty of poor women who wanted abortions – and took
this to be so self-evident that it did not bother to cite any supporting evidence.41
Yet this claim was essential to their reasons for denying poor women Medicaid
funding for abortions. For, the Court held, were the government responsible for the
poverty of poor women, it would have a duty to remove poverty-caused obstacles
to the exercise of the right to abortion, a duty to fund abortions for poor women.
In Bowers v. Hardwick the Supreme Court held that the right to privacy does not
cover consensual homosexual sodomy between adults, even though this occurs in
the home, where others need not witness it. The Court cited in its support, the
condemnation of homosexuality in the Old Testament, in medieval law and in the
law of many States in the Union. It argued that, in the face of abiding and deepseated prejudice against homosexuality, it was “facetious” to claim that there was a
constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, found in the constitutional right to
privacy and guarantees of procedural due process.42 Yet, Bowers provided no
evidence that consensual adult homosexual sodomy harms anyone, or interferes
with the rights of individuals and should be banned. Rather, it supposed, the mere
fact that people were prejudiced against such sex acts provided warrant for the
state to prohibit them. In each case, MacKinnon argues, the right to privacy
naturalized and justified social inequality, turning the biological and social
differences between individuals into the basis for disadvantage and subordination.
It enabled the Supreme Court to maintain that the state need not fund abortions for
poor women because it was not responsible for their poverty or their pregnancy.
Hence MacKinnon claims that “… the Harris result sustains the ultimate meaning of
privacy in Roe: women are guaranteed by the public no more than what we can get
in private”. The same could be said of Bowers. The Court decided to affirm only that
part of the challenged Georgia statute condemning homosexual sodomy, refusing to
rule on the statute’s criminalization of heterosexual sodomy as well.44 It held that
homosexual sodomy had nothing to do with the familial and reproductive concerns
underlying the constitutional right to privacy, because it was homosexual and,
therefore, raised no issues of procreation or contraception.45 It failed to consider
how previous laws against homosexuals might have promoted or inflamed
prejudice against them, or how its own ruling might threaten the public standing,
dignity and freedom of individuals who are, or are thought to be, homosexual.46 In
this way, it promoted precisely those conditions which have done most to prevent
homosexuals from seeking and exercising political power, or positions of public
prominence and civic responsibility. So, far from providing a neutral or impartial
standard for resolving conflicts over the uses of state power, MacKinnon concludes,
the public/private distinction undermines their principled and democratic
resolution. It guarantees, she believes, that oppressed and disadvantaged social
groups will lack impartial judges in those institutions which our society uses to
hear, judge and redress the grievances of individuals, whether courts, parliaments
or public opinion. “To fail to recognize the meaning of the private in the ideology
and reality of women’s subordination by seeking protection behind a right to that
privacy is to cut women off from collective verification and state support in the
same act”, MacKinnon concludes.4
Privacy affirms normalized power hierarchies – individualism, choice and desire
are all related to gender distinctions in the law
Olsen ’93 Professor of law at UCLA, member of school of Feminist Legal Theory
(Frances, Constitutional Law: Feminist critiques of the public/private distinction, page
325-326)//FM
The important critical point is that injustice
cannot be justified by means of the public/private
distinction. Thus, I disagree with the assertion in Larry Alexander's paper that "absolutely nothing follows" from this
criticism of the state action doctrine or of the public/private dichotomy.22 What follows from the criticism is that the asserted
presence or absence of state action is not a justification for an otherwise unjust decision. On a third level of critique, deeper
political meanings are found behind the appeal of privacy. Notions of
individualism,23 of choice 24 and of
desire,25 and the reasons why we value privacy26 are deeply related to the peculiar importance
placed on the male/female distinction and to the subordination of women. Privacy is related to
manhood; "private parts" are sexual; and the classical liberal individual is not an asexual "person" but the male head of a
family. Privacy is most enjoyed by those with power. To the powerless, the private realm is
frequently a sphere not of freedom but of uncertainty and insecurity.21 On this level of critique, the
point is not just that men enjoy a kind of privacy in the family that women and children do not enjoy (but rather too often suffer
under).
Rather, the standard situation in which one enjoys privacy and freedom is not a situation
of equality but one of hierarchy. We virtually never all enjoy privacy equally, and the pretense
that equality is the norm, and situations of domination an exception, is simply another way of
maintaining the status quo.
Privacy is critical to male denial of abuse to save face in the public sphere –
reinforces patriarchy
Schneider 91-- Director of the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship
Program, Staff Attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and a Staff
Attorney with the Rutgers Law School-Newark Constitutional Litigation Clinic,
(Elizabeth, Violence of Privacy, The Symposium: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, 23 Conn. L. Rev. 973,
1990-1991, p. 983-985,
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/conlr23&collection=journals&id=987&men_hide=false&men_tab=citn
av)//MG
There has been little change in the culture of female subordination that and maintains abuse. At the same time, there is a
serious backlash to these reform efforts and many of the reforms that have been accomplished are in serious jeopardy. For the
last several years, while writing a a report on national legal reform efforts for battered women for The Ford Foundation, I have
been amazed at the enormous accomplishments of the battered women’s movement over the last 20 years. Indeed, I can think
of few recent social movements that have accomplished so much in such a short time. However, I have also have been stunned
by the depth of social resistance to change. Although battering
has evolved from a “private” to a more
“public” issue, it has not become a serious political issue, precisely because it has
profound implications for all of our lives. Battering is deeply threatening. It goes to our most
fundamental assumptions about the nature of intimate relations and the safeness of
family life. The concept of male battering of women as a “private” issue exerts a powerful ideological pull on our
consciousness because, in some sense, it is something that we would like to believe. By seeing woman abuse as
“private,” we affirm it as a problem that is individual that only involves a particular
male-female relationship and for which there is no social responsibility to remedy. Each of
us needs to deny the seriousness and pervasiveness of battering, but more significantly, the interconnectedness of battering
with so many other aspects of family life and gender relations. Instead of focusing on the batterer,
we focus on the
battered woman, scrutinize her conduct, examine her pathology and blame her for not leaving the
relationship, in order to maintain that denial and refuse to confront the issues of power.
Focusing on the woman, not the man, perpetuates the power of patriarchy. Denial supports the power of
patriarchy . Denial supports and legitimates this power; the concept of privacy is a
key aspect of this denial. Denial takes many forms and operates on many levels. Men deny battering
in order to protect their own privilege. Women need to deny the pervasiveness of the problem so as not to
link it to their own life situations. Individual women who are battered tend to minimize the violence in order to distance
themselves from some internalized negative concept of “battered woman.” I see denial in the attitudes of jurors, who try to
remove themselves and say that it could never happen to me; if it did, I would handle it differently. I see denial in the public
engagement in the Hedda Nussbaum/Joel Steinberg case which focused on Hedda Nussbaum’s complicity, and involved
feminists in active controversy over the boundaries of victimization. The
findings of the many state task
force reports on gender bias in the courts have painstakingly recorded judicial
attitudes of denial. Clearly, there is serious denial of the part of state legislators, members
of Congress and the Executive Branch who never mention battering as an important public issue.
In battering, we see both the power of denial and the denial of power. The concept of
privacy is an ideological rationale for this denial and serves to maintain it. The concept of privacy
encourages, reinforces and supports violence against women. Privacy says that
violence against women is immune from sanction, that it is permitted, acceptable and part of the basic
fabric of American family life. Privacy says that what goes on in the violent relationship should not be the subject of state or
community intervention. Privacy says that it as an individual and not a systemic problem. Privacy
operates as a
mask for inequality, protecting male violence against women.
Liberal legal equality subordinates others—fails to help victims.
Fineman 94-- Robert W. Woodruff Professor at Emory School of Law, legal scholar
within the fields of family law and feminist legal Theory, founder and director of the
Feminism and Legal Theory (FLT) Project (Martha, The Public Nature of Private
Violence: Women and the Discovery of Abuse, 1994, p. 65-66)//MG
Cultural stereotypes of women are imported into law through standards of reasonableness
and “objective” intuitions about what behavior is appropriate in women who are hurt by our partners (Mahoney
1991). The
cultural preoccupation with exit from violent relationships is reinscribed in law
through the preconceptions and expectations of legal actors, including judges, juries, social workers, and
attorneys. To date, the best answer the legal system has achieved is to explain battered women’s behavior psychologically,
through battered woman syndrome, which is offered to explain failure to separate as well as other aspects of the woman’s
perceptions and behavior. There is
an ironic circularity here: battered woman syndrome itself is
often understood to describe helplessness and pathological dependency in women, even
when experts include sociological factors such as lack of safety or societal support for battered
women in their discussion. Explanations for failure to leave are understood as focusing on victimization- in part because
they explain “failure.” Law and legal argument contain ideological assumptions about agency that
make it difficult to show both oppression and resistance in the lives of battered women. Most
fundamentally, the fiction of formal equality hurts all subordinated people. In labor law, for example,
the notion that employers and employees are equally free to leave the work relationship is a
fundamental underlying tenet of American capitalism. In family law, as Martha Fineman’s work has shown,
concepts of formal equality incorporated into divorce reform efforts have created a legal regime that devalues caregiving and
hurts the interests of single mothers and children (Fineman 1988, 1991a). The structure of much legal argument incorporates
this concept of formal equality. If you prove that you lack effective agency, the law may protect you from the harshest results
of enforcing your contracts; otherwise, you are an equally powerful free actor whose contracts will be enforced. The notion of
people as actors on a playing field permeates legal argument: if you prove your status as a victim wrongfully placed behind
obstacles or off the field, you get to be helped back on so that you too can “play.” This
view of agency as the
functioning of an autonomous, mobile, individual actor has a flip side of victimization, with
important consequences for battered women. It is difficult- it may be impossible- to
represent agency and struggle in women’s lives in relation to a negative-state, libertarian
approach to law.
Liberal Legalism - Gender Links
Liberal legalism naturalizes the masculine subject – subordinating the feminine
under the law
Maschke, ‘90 - Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University, research
scholar at the Hastings Institute (Karen, “Gender and American Law, Feminist Legal
Theories,” p. 627-632, Routledge) //DS
For CLS theorists,
the most frequent unifying theme is opposition to a common target: the
dominance of liberal legalism and the role the law has played in maintaining it. ON
this issue, critical feminism offers more varied and more ambivalent responses. This diversity in
part reflects the diversity of perspectives within the liberal tradition. The target appearing in many critical legal studies
accounts, and in some critical feminist analyses, is only one version of liberal legalism, generally the 32ëversion favored by the
law and economics commentators. Under a more robust framework, many inequalities of greatest concern to feminists reflect
limitations less in liberal premises than in efforts to realize liberalism’s full potential.
From both a philosophical and pragmatic standpoint, feminist legal critics have less stake in the assault on liberalism than CLS.
Their primary target is gender inequality, whatever its pedigree, and their allies in many concrete political struggles have
critical feminist theorists joint the challenge to
liberal legalism, they often do so on somewhat modified grounds. Their opposition tends to focus on the
particular form of liberalism embodied in existing legal and political structures and
on the gender biases it reflects.
Although they differ widely in other respects, liberal theorists generally begin from the premise
that the state’s central objective lies in maximizing individuals’ freedom to pursue
their own objectives to an extent consistent with the same freedom for others. Implicit
come as often from liberal as from radical camps. Thus, when
is in this vision are several assumptions about the nature of individuals and the subjectivity of values. As conventionally
presented, the liberal state is composed of autonomous, rational individuals. Their expressed choices reflect a stable and
coherent understanding of their independent interests. Yet, while capable o full knowledge of their own preferences, these
liberal selves lack similar knowledge about others. Accordingly, the good society remains as neutral as possible about the
meaning of the good life: it seeks simply to provide the conditions necessary for individuals to maximize their own preferences
through voluntary transactions. Although liberal theorists differ widely about what those background conditions entail, they
share a commitment to preserving private zones for autonomous choices, free from public intervention.
Critical feminist theorists have challenged this account along several dimensions. According to theorists such as West, these
liberal legalist selves are peculiarly masculine constructs – peculiarly capable of
infallible judgments about their own wants and peculiarly incapable of empathetic
knowledge of the wants of others. Classic liberal frameworks take contractual exchanges rather than
affiliative relationships as the norm. Such frameworks undervalue the ways social networks construct human identities and
the ways individual preferences are formed in the reference to the needs and concerns of others.
For many women, a
nurturing, giving self has greater normative and descriptive resonance than an autonomous, egoistic self. Critical
feminists by no means agree about the extent, origins, or implications of such gender differences. Some concept of autonomy
has been central to the American women’s movement since its inception, autonomy from the constraints of male authority and
traditional roles. How much emphasis to place on values of self-determination and how much to place on values of affiliation
have generated continuing controversies that cannot be resolved at the abstract level on which debate has often foundered.
Even critical feminists who agree about the significance of difference disagree about
its causes and likely persistence. Disputes center on how much importance is
attributable to women’s intimate connection to others through childbirth and
identification with primary caretakers, how much to cultural norms that encourage
women’s deference, empathy, and disproportionate assumption of nurturing
responsibilities, and how much to inequalities in women’s status and power.
Yet, despite these disagreements, most critical feminists share an emphasis on the importance of social relationships in
shaping individual preferences. From such a perspective,
no adequate conception of the good society
can be derived through standard liberal techniques, which hypothesize social contracts among
atomistic actors removed from the affiliations that give meaning to their lives and content to their choices. This feminist
perspective points up a related difficulty in liberal frameworks, which critical theorists from a variety of traditions have noted.
The liberal assumption that individuals’ expressed preferences can be taken as
reflective of genuine preferences is flatly at odds with much of what we know about
human behavior. To a substantial extent, our choices are socially constructed and constrained; the desires we develop
are partly a function of the desires our culture reinforces. As long as gender plays an important role in shaping individual
expectations and aspirations, expressed objectives cannot be equated with full human potential. Women, for example, may
“choose” to remain in an abusive relationship, but such choices are not ones most liberals would want to maximize. Yet a
liberal legalist society has difficulty distinguishing between “authentic “ and “inauthentic” preferences without violating its
own commitments concerning neutrality and the subjectivity of value.
In its conventional
form, liberal legalism assumes that appropriate conduct can be defined primarily in
terms of adherence to the procedurally legitimate and determinate rules, that law
can be separated from politics, and that spheres of private life can be insulated from
public intrusion.
The feminist critique joins other CLS work in denying that the rule of law in fact offers a
principled, impartial, and determinate means of dispute resolution. Attention has centered both on
the subjectivity of legal standards and the gender biases in their application. By
exploring particular substantive areas, feminists have underscored the law’s fluctuation between
standards that are too abstract to resolve particular cases and rules that are too
specific to result in a principled, generalizable norm. Such explorations have also
revealed sex-based assumptions that undermine the liberal legal order’s own
aspirations. These limitations in conventional doctrine are particularly apparent in
the law’s consistently inconsistent analysis of gender difference. Decision makers have often
Similar problems arise with the legal ideology that underpins contemporary liberal frameworks.
reached identical legal results from competing factual premises. In other cases, the same notions about sexual distinctiveness
have yielded opposite conclusions. Identical assumptions about women’s special virtues or vulnerabilities have served as
arguments for both favored and disfavored legal treatment in criminal and family law, and for both including and excluding
her from public roles such as professional occupations and jury service. For example, although courts and legislatures
traditionally assumed that it was “too plain” for discussion that sex-based distinctions in criminal sentencing statutes and child
custody decisions were appropriate, it was less plain which way those distinctions cut. Under different statutory schemes,
women received lesser or greater punishments for the same criminal acts in different historical periods were favored or
disfavored as the guardians of their children.
Liberal legalism presumption of consent undermines women’s positions –
perpetuating patriarchy
Deckha no date – Faculty of Law Associate Professor, University of Victoria (Maneesha, Pain,
Pleasure, and Consenting Women: Exploring Feminist Responses to S/M and its Legal Regulation in Canada Through Jelinek’s The
Piano Teacher, p. 425-426)
Consent is a critical analytical tool in western liberal legal traditions. It is the basis, in its form
of the social contract, for foundational theories of justice and underpins a hallmark of the core
liberal precondition for human flourishing: autonomy. Under liberal legalism, choosing to do
something typically legitimates that activity as long as it does not harm others. Conversely,
being forced to do something is typically perceived as an infringement of personhood. For
feminists, an example that comes easily to mind to demonstrate the significance of consent,
and the principle of autonomy that underlies it, is the difference between sex and rape, a
distinction that turns on consent. The absence of consent turns a socially approved and
even celebrated act of love and expression into an act of violence. It is no wonder,
then, that feminist writing on consent in this particular area has often been
concerned wit ensuring the presence of “real” consent, impugning the ideas of
constructive or implied consent to sex, and emphasizing instead that “no means no,” to
expunge long-standing rape myths and norms about female sexuality that have made
women’s bodies vulnerable to violation. Feminists have been worried that sexual assault
laws will look erroneously to context to construe consent from conduct where none existed
verbally. At the same time, feminists have also challenged liberal legalism’s presuppositions
and encouraged advertising to context to caution presuming that even explicit consent has
been given freely. The concern in both situations is the same: that the law will assume
consent where none existed. But whereas in the former situation, the concern predicts
that the law will look to context too much, in the latter situation the concern for many
feminists is that the law will ignore social, cultural, and economic context limiting women’s
options. Feminists have provided critical readings of women’s apparent consent to practices
(e.g., child care, domestic labor, modified career patterns, etc.) that conform to naturalized
and traditional gender roles, taking care to explain the context surrounding women’s choices.
They question whether decisions made in non-ideal conditions can ever count as real
exercises of choice and are concerned that the law will too easily presume or recognize
women’s consent for decisions that are adverse to their interests and/or otherwise leave
existing power structures intact. Since consent is intimately tied with responsibility in this
binary, such that one is generally held responsible for something if one consents to it
while one is absolved if one is coerced, feminists worry that women will be held
responsible for their decisions while the hegemonic social structures that shape those
decisions remain intact . In short, feminists “have been quick to locate the structural
determinants of consent.”
Liberal legalism’s “fundamentality” naturalizes gender as prior to the law –
obliterating the contingency of gender
Murphy ’97 – Professor at Queen’s University School of Law (Thérèse Murphy, Law
and Critique, “Feminism on flesh,” December, Vol. 8, Issue 1, p.37-59 Springer
Science+Business Media)//MA
Despite these tensions, impasses and awkward Cartesian resonances, the contributors to Law and Body Politics push ahead
with their own body politics' strategy. Striking a common contemporary note, they are keen to rekindle rights discourse. For
example, Elizabeth Kingdom sketches a "conversion" strategy which might allow for safer feminist use of recently-treacherous,
rights-based arguments. Elsewhere, Fiona Beveridge a Siobhan Mullally prise open international human rights law in order to
endorse the "right to bodily integrity" as a possible mechanism whereby that discipline might go beyond its universal human
subject to recognize issues relating to the female body. These are valiant and timely efforts. It is some time since legal
feminism wielded the
building blocks of liberal legalism – privacy, autonomy, consent
and equal treatment – with any consistent success. In fact, liberal legalism – feminism’s original
flexible friend - has turned out to be both treacherous and unpredictable. I suspect that it
may even have stalled the development of an effective legal feminist body politics given
that much legal feminism is now in a no-win situation, both enraptured of, and ensnared by, the
liberal legal notions the body as property and the individual as holder of rights to
privacy and self-determination. We are used to dismissing the body as a biologically determined, ahistorical
base on which subjectivity is carved in order to create more obvious parallels between women and the rational, but usually
disembodied, individual of rights discourse. But surely such a strategy is now counter-productive, especially when even US
legal feminist applause for the rhetoric of fundamental rights – in particular, the
privacy doctrine – has begun to wane. By 1992, we had to acknowledge that Roe v.
Wade was no longer such a bright star in the feminist firmament, compromised by
withdrawal of state funding for abortions and the proliferation of “competing”
rights. Even longer ago, after Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986, a new anxiety had begun to grow
up around the US Supreme Court explanations of what makes a right “fundamental”.
The Court’s explanations were found to portray the heterosexual institutions of
marriage, procreation and family as “an integral part of what it means to be human” , and thus,
“somehow prior to law”. We began to see that this “rhetoric of fundamentality conceals the state’s
role in the production of gender by naturalising the heterosexual props [family,
marriage and procreation] that instantiate the scripts of masculinity and
femininity”. Contemporary legal feminist support for, or use of, fundamental rights thus
runs the risk of shoring up this naturalization and obliterating the contingency of
gender.
Liberal legal privacy imposes social-political roles unto women, enabling
direct autonomy into the private sphere
Mackinnon 83 - Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Visiring professor of
law at Harvard Law School.. (Catharine A., “Privacy vs. Equality: Beyond Roe vs. Wade”
http://politicalscience.tamu.edu/documents/faculty/MacKinnon-Privacy_v_Equality.pdf )//KM
The idea of privacy, if regarded as the outer edge of the limitations on government, embodies, I
think, a tension between the preclusion of public exposure or governmental intrusion, on the
one hand, and autonomy in the sense of protecting personal self-action on the other. This is a
tension, not just two facets of one whole right. In the liberal state this tension is resolved by demarking the
threshold of the state at its permissible extent of penetration into a domain that is considered
free by definition: the private sphere. It is by this move that the state secures to individuals what has
been termed “an inviolable personality” by ensuring what has been called “autonomy or control
over the intimacies of personal identity” 1°The state does this by centering its self-restraint on
body and home, especially bedroom. By staying out of marriage and the family, prominently meaning sexuality - that is to say, heterosexuality—from contraception through pornography to the abortion decision, the law of privacy
proposes to guarantee individual bodily integrity, personal exercise of moral intelligence, and
freedom of intimacy. 11 But if one asks whether women’s rights to these values have been
guaranteed, it appears that the law of privacy works to translate traditional social values into
the rhetoric of individual rights as a means of subordinating those rights to specific social
imperatives. 12 In feminist terms I am arguing that the logic of Roe consummated in Harris translates the ideology of
the private sphere into the individual woman’s legal right to privacy as a means of subordinating
women’s collective needs to the imperatives of male supremacy. This is my retrospective on Roe v. Wade.
Reproduction is sexual, men control sexuality, and the state supports the interest of men as a group. Roe does not contradict
this. So why was abortion legalized? Why
were women even imagined to have such a right as privacy? It
is not an accusation of bad faith to answer that the interests of men as a social group converged
with the definition of justice embodied in law in what I call the male point of view. The way the
male point of view constructs a social event or legal need will be the way that social event or legal
need is framed by state policy. For example, to the extent that possession is the point of sex, illegal rape will be sex
with a woman who is not yours unless the act makes her yours. If part of the kick of pornography involves eroticizing the
putatively prohibited, illegal pornography—obscenity—will be prohibited enough to keep pornography desirable without
ever making it truly illegitimate or unavailable. If,
from the male standpoint, male is the implicit definition
of human, maleness will be the implicit standard by which sex equality is measured in
discrimination law. In parallel terms, abortion’s availability frames, and is framed by, the conditions men work out among
themselves to grant legitimacy to women to control the reproductive consequences of intercourse. Since Freud, the social
problem posed by sexuality has been perceived as the problem of the innate desire for sexual pleasure being repressed by the
constraints of civilization. In this context, the inequality of the sexes arises as an issue only in women’s repressive socialization
to passivity and coolness (so-called frigidity), in women’s so-called desexualization, and in the disparate consequences of
biology, that is, pregnancy. Who defines what is sexual, what sexuality therefore is, to whom what stimuli are erotic and why,
and who defines the conditions under which sexuality is expressed—these issues are not even available to be considered.
“Civilization’s” answer to these questions fuses women’s reproductivity with our attributed sexuality in its definition of what a
woman is. We are
defined as women by the uses to which men put us. In this context it becomes
clear why the struggle for reproductive freedom has never included a woman’s right to refuse sex. In this
notion of sexual liberation, the equality issue has been framed as a struggle for women to have sex with men on the same
terms as men: “without consequences.” In this sense, the abortion right has been sought as freedom from the reproductive
consequences of sexual expression, with sexuality defined as centered on heterosexual genital intercourse. It is as if biological
organisms, rather than social relations, reproduced the species. But if your concern is not how more people can get more sex,
but who defines sexuality—pleasure and violation both—then the abortion right is situated within a very different
problematic: the social and political problematic of the inequality of the sexes. As Susan Sontag said, “Sex itself is not liberating
for women. Neither is more sex…The question is, what sexuality shall women be liberated to enjoy?” 13 To
address this
requires reformulating the problem of sexuality from the repression of drives by civilization to
the oppression of women by men.
Liberal Legalism – Diversity Links
Liberal legalism undermines diversity and coalition building – prioritizes
individualism
Dossa ‘99 – Professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova
Scotia (Shiraz Dossa, The European Legacy, “Legal liberalism: Law, culture, and identity,” Vol. 4, Issue 3, p.73-87, Taylor and
Francis Online)//MA
As several critics have observed, the liberal
ethic is not neutral, not disinterested, not impartial
and nowhere near as tolerant as it claims to be. Its enabling logic is shallow and
contradictory: "liberalism itself instantiates one particular vision of the good, namely, that choice is itself the
highest good". Furthermore, the liberal state "embraces a view of the human good that favours certain
ways of life and tilts against others", while denying that it does either. Liberal law is
the logical and ideological offspring of liberal ideology: it legally articulates and
buttresses the rights-based individualist heart of liberalism. Liberal law rhetorically
authorises diversity, but in practice it routinely limits its expression: cultural diversity is not
encouraged. For authentic diversity is a collectivist ideal, not an individual option: a way of life is a
way of life precisely because it is shared by many. A singular choice yields eccentricity, group choices produce a sustaining
cultural community that allows the pursuit of a way of life. By their very nature cultural
communities are not
driven by egoism/individualism, nor can they survive in the privacy of homes: they will
survive and flourish, if at all, in a public milieu that both accepts and recognises the value of cultural diversity as a good in
itself.
Law/State
Law normalizes male-centered protect males, marginalizing women’s politics
and voices
Theis no date– attended University of Michigan Law School and is now an
attorney/associate at Reisman Karron Greene LLP.
(Adriane Theis, “Liberal Privacy and Women: A Broken
Promise” http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10066/726/2006TheisA.pdf?sequence=1 pg. 55-56)//CC
Throughout the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence, the primary linguists of law
have almost exclusively been men—white, educated, economically privileged men. Men have shaped it,
they have defined it, they have interpreted it and given it meaning consistent with their
understandings of the world and of people “other” than them. As the men of law have
defined law in their own image, law has excluded or marginalized the voices and
meanings of these “others”…Because the men of law have had the societal power not to
have to worry too much about the competing terms and understandings of “others,” they have
been insulated from challenges to their language and have thus come to see it as
natural, inevitable, complete, objective and neutral. 128 In a nutshell, this is how law became a
male-centered discourse. Men had societal power. In authoring the rules for their societies, they made
rules according to their needs and experiences since they were subject to the law. The male experience as formulated into law then
went through the historical process of being interpreted by other men until eventually, the discourse could not be identified as a
male-centered discourse, but was merely a natural reflection of society. Since excluded groups were not participants in society, the
law did not need to address their concerns. In creating a law just for themselves, men created a system that reflected their
characteristics as men. “Rationality, abstraction, a preference for statistical and empirical proofs over experiential or anecdotal
evidence, and a conflict model of social life corresponds to how these men have been socialized and educated to think, live and
work.”129 Because these were the life experiences of men, they were the characteristics around which they shaped their law. Thus
American constitutional law favors rationality as the highest principle, works in abstract principles rather than in contextual
experience, works in dichotomies where a person has a right or does not, and is very adversarial where there are clear-cut winners
and losers. Over time, the law had to make these characteristics appear natural and objective so that others would believe in the
legitimacy of law. “To keep its operation fair in appearance, which it must if people are to trust resorting to the legal method for
resolving competing claims, the law strives for rules that are universal, objective and neutral.”130 Universality
and
neutrality hid the male-centered foundations of law. With the appearance of objectivity,
the law could be applied to groups not previously considered when law was being
written. In this way, new groups could easily be brought under the patriarchal legal
system without sacrificing the privileging of the male point of view. This means, however, that
women seeking recourse to law are seeking recourse to a system that is hostile to their
needs. The patriarchy underlying the American legal system means that state power is
not to be understood in its own terms, but as a part of a ubiquitous system of
patriarchal power. This means that it is not a neutral tool equally available for women and men, and that it will not
automatically respond to the dictates of reason or justice.
Perception of law as neutral tool normalizes patriarchy – ignoring women’s
experiences
Theis no date – attended University of Michigan Law School and is now an
attorney/associate at Reisman Karron Greene LLP.
(Adriane Theis, “Liberal Privacy and Women: A Broken
Promise” http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10066/726/2006TheisA.pdf?sequence=1 pg. 56-57)//CC
The law, therefore, is not a neutral and objective tool for protecting rights and seeking
equality. It will produce the results conducive to its survival. In order to maintain coherence and its
appearance of objectivity, the law tries to treat women as equal to men for the sake of
formal equality. Yet women’s social situation and personal agency have been vastly
different from that of men. Because the male-centered law was simply applied to woman as if she were a man, The
state will appear most relentless in imposing the male point of view when it comes closest to achieving its highest formal criterion of
distanced aperspectivity. When
it is most ruthlessly neutral, it will be most male; when it is most
sex blind, it will be most blind to the sex of the standard being applied. When it most closely
conforms to precedent, to “facts,” to legislative intent, it will most closely enforce socially male norms and most thoroughly preclude
questioning their content as having a point of view at all. 132 Because
law has been functioning as a male
discourse for so long, and because the legal system is overwhelmingly male, it cannot
recognize its own point of view. Thus, when the law neutrally applies its male-centered
standards on women, women become treated as if they were men and the law
completely neglects to consider women’s social situations and experiences.
Citizenship/Rights
Language of citizenship, equality and privacy rights mystifies social relations as
abstract legal concepts – only reaffirming domination over marginalized groups
Turkel ’88 – Professor of Sociology at University of Delaware (Gerald Turkel, Law &
Society Review, “The Public/Private Distinction: Approaches to the Critique of Legal
Ideology,” Vol. 22, Issue 4, p.805, JSTOR)//MA
There are three major approaches to the public/private dichotomy in law in Marx's writings. First, from the vantage point of
philosophical criticism, the
public/ private distinction provides the categorical framework for
legal discourse. These categories have an abstract, mystifying universality: the discourse of
"citizenship,” "formal equality," and "private rights" obscures the social relationships among
people and their conditions of life. Mystification is accomplished through a method that
inverts the actual relationship between social relations and legal categories. In its ideological
formulation, the private/public distinction in legal theory reverses the dependency between social institutions and legal
categories (1978a: 16-18). For example, civil
society and the private sphere are made to appear to be
dependent on legal categories that demarcate them as arenas of action. Owning property, buying
and selling on the market, and engaging in household consumption have their social significance established through a
universalizing legal discourse rather than through the practica l
meaning they have for actors. The
domination and inequality characteristic of civil society and the private sphere are obscured
through legal categories that are posited idealistically. Specifically, the equality and freedom
posited in the public sphere serve to secure social, religious, and material distinctions in the
form of private rights that are the material conditions of inequality and conflict through
which social relations are constituted (Marx 1978b: 33-42). Both the reduction of "the worker's need to the
barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence" and the "refinement of needs" of those with wealth are buttressed by
public principles of formal equality a commodity exchange (1964: 149-53). To be sure, bourgeois law provides an ideal vision
of freedom and equality that is an historic advance over doctrines that stressed beliefs in natural superiority. Yet, it actually
serves as a formal framework for the realization of private power and domination.
Equality
Equality in the law only reinforces social inequalities
Roth, Ph.D in sociology, 99 – PhD in Sociology from New York University,
Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Arizona University (Louise
Marie, Ph.D, Sociology and Women’s Studies, "The Right to Privacy Is Political: Power, the Boundary Between Public and
Private, and Sexual Harassment," 24.1, (1999), p.56, Law and Social Inquiry) //DS
Feminist scholars have revealed that noninterference in the "private" realm has the
effect of reinforcing power and powerlessness (MacKinnon 1989). Formal equality fails to
engender real equality, and even reinforces inequality, because power relations
from the public realm operate with impunity in the arena of nonintervention. In
guaranteeing a right to privacy in the private sphere to all citizens, the liberal state
legitimates an area in which inequalities of power based on resources, knowledge,
and symbolic attributions can act with impunity (MacKinnon 1989; Polan 1993; Hoff 1991). The
development of a feminist critique of the legal and ideological division of private and
public, of personal and political, led to the feminist mantra, "The personal is political." Not only is
the personal political in the sense that the private sphere contains power relations that mirror
those outside it, but systemic power also influences the right to privacy. The arbitrariness
of the discursive boundary between public and private subjects it to the influence of social power.
Turns Case
Economy
Gender equity’s a prerequisite to economic growth – increase efficiency and productivity
Sharma and Keefe ‘11 – Ritu Sharma is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Social Media for Nonprofits,
Joe Keefe is President and Chief Executive Officer of Pax World Management LLC, and of Pax World Funds (“A Solution For A
Struggling Global Economy: Gender Equality,” Forbes, 10/14/11,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2011/10/14/a-solution-for-a-struggling-global-economy-genderequality/)//EM
They might have added that without
gender equality sustainable economic development
cannot be achieved either. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that women are the key to a
global economic recovery. A few weeks ago, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chairing the first-ever AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) High-Level Policy Dialogue on Women and the Economy, made this point emphatically:
“By
increasing women’s participation in the economy and enhancing their efficiency
and productivity, we can have a dramatic impact on the competitiveness and growth
of our economies.” In her remarks, Secretary Clinton recounted some of the evidence: The Economist found
that the increase in employment of women in developed economies during the past
decade contributed more to global growth than did China. In the U.S., a McKinsey
study found that women went from holding 37% of all jobs to nearly 48% over the
past 40 years, and that the productivity gains attributable to this modest increase in
women’s share of the labor market now accounts for approximately 25% of U.S.
GDP. That works out to over $3.5 trillion – more than the GDP of Germany and more
than half the GDPs of China and Japan. Women are indeed the world’s third largest
“emerging market” after China and India. A Boston Consulting Group survey
concludes that women will control $15 trillion in global spending by the year 2014
and by 2028 will be responsible for about two-thirds of all consumer spending
worldwide. As farmers, workers, business owners and householders, women are central to the global
economy. In developing countries, rural women farmers grow most of the food that
is eaten and dominate the informal economy. In the U.S., they drive most consumer purchasing
decisions and are now half the workforce and the majority of college graduates. Yet the barriers to women’s full
economic participation – laws, customs and practices that reinforce gender
discrimination at multiple levels – remain. Women are over-represented at the bottom of the global
economy and under-represented at the top. They constitute a majority of the world’s poor, more than 60% of the world’s
hungry, hold less than 20 percent of the world’s land titles despite their dependence on and predominance in agriculture, and
are much more likely to be illiterate and face gender-based violence. Among Fortune 500 companies, women hold only three
percent of CEO positions and 15 percent of board seats. It
is time we understand that these barriers are
not only tragically unjust but are also fundamental impediments to global economic
growth. Put simply, persistent gender inequality is holding countries back. In SubSaharan Africa, it’s estimated that between 1960 and 1992 inequality between men and women in education and employment
suppressed annual per capita growth by 0.8% points per year; gender equality would have doubled economic growth over
that time period. The
Asia and Pacific region is losing $42 billion to $47 billion annually
because of women’s limited access to employment opportunities, and another $16 –
$30 billion as a result of gender gaps in education.
Impacts
Patriarchy = War/Extinction
Patriarchy causes violence, which escalates to nuclear extinction.
Spretnak 89 - MA in English from University of California, Berkely, (Charlene, “Exposing Nuclear
Phallacies,” 1989, p. 60) //DS
Most men in our
patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that are radically
inappropriate for the nuclear age. To provide dominance and control, to distance one’s
character from that of women, to survive the toughest violent initiation, to shed the blood of
the hero, to collaborate with death in order to hold it at bay- all of these patriarchal
pressures on men have traditionally reached resolution in ritual fashion on the battlefield.
But there is no longer any battlefield. Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a crucial, large-scale
conventional war it would refrain from using it’s multiple war-head nuclear missiles because of some diplomatic agreement?
The military theatre of nuclear exchange today would extend, instantly or eventually, to all living things, all the air, all the soil,
all the water If we believe war is a “necessary evil,” that
patriarchal assumptions are simply “human
nature” then we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The ultimate result of unchecked terminal
patriarchy will be nuclear holocaust.
Patriarchy sustains militaristic control and necessitates constant war – we must
dismantle this construct.
De Lima 3 – writer for the New Straits Times in Malaysia (Anthea, “Of War and
Women,” (December 25, 2003) New Straits Times) //DS
In her paper, co-ordinator of the Gender Studies Programme at University of Malaya, Dr Shanthi Thambiah, said that
theorising about militarisation as a social process, rather than war and peace, was
important to expose ways in which patriarchy promotes and sustains military values and
needs. "Women too have a role to play in this but ironically, most of the theorising is done by women in countries which
offer physicalSECURITY for devoting their energies to a project beyond day-today living. Other women are less fortunate
because they lack a sense of elementary safety. "Thus, those women with the most pressing need to discover the underlying
causes of war, militarism and peace are precisely those with the least capacity to write down their thoughts," she said. She
went on to discuss several feminist interpretations
of militarisation, concluding that they generally
implicated patriarchy as the root cause of militarism. "It is this patriarchal structure of
privilege and control that must be dismantled if we are to get rid of militarism. A feminist
theory of militarisation should be able to show that as long as patriarchal assumptions
about masculinity and femininity shape people's beliefs and identities and their relationship
with one another, militarisation that may lay dormant will rise again and again," she said.
Violence
Gendered security discourse causes inevitable violence—Western values
Shepherd ‘7-- Department of Political Science and International Studies at the
University of Birmingham [Laura J., “Victims, Perpetrators and Actors’ Revisited:1
Exploring the Potential for a Feminist Reconceptualisation of (International)
Security and (Gender) Violence,” BJPIR: 2007 VOL 9, 239–256]//MG
As Spike Peterson and Jacqui True comment, ‘our sense of self-identity and security may seem disproportionately threatened
by societal challenge to gender ordering’ (Peterson and True 1998, 17). That is, the performance of gender is immanent in the
performance of security and vice versa, both concern issues of ontological cohesion (as illustrated in Table 2). Taking this on
board leads me to the conclusion that perhaps security
is best conceived of as referring to
ontological rather than existential identity effects. Security , if seen as performative of particular
configurations of social/political order,
is inherently gendered and inherently related to
violence . Violence, on this view, performs an ordering function—not only in the
theory/practice of security and the reproduction of the international, but also in the
reproduction of gendered subjects. Butler acknowledges that ‘violence is done in the name of
preserving western values’ (Butler 2004, 231); that is, the ordering function that is performed through the violence
investigated here, as discussed above, organizes political authority and subjectivity in an image that is in keeping with
the values of the powerful, often at the expense of the marginalized. ‘Clearly, the west
does not author all violence, but it does, upon suffering or anticipating injury,
marshal violence to preserve its borders, real or imaginary’ (ibid.). While Butler refers to the
violence undertaken in the protection of the sovereign state—violence in the name of security—
the preservation of borders is also recognizable in the conceptual domain of the international and in the adherence to a binary
materiality of gender. This adherence
is evidenced in the desire to fix the meaning of
concepts in ways that are not challenging to the current configuration of
social/political order and subjectivity, and is product/productive of ‘the exclusionary
presuppositions and foundations that shore up discursive practices insofar as those foreclose
the heterogeneity, gender, class or race of the subject’ (Hanssen 2000, 215).
Alternative
Personal is Political
Reject the affirmative public/private distinction by embracing that the personal
is political – opens space for understanding the political contingency of gender
inequality
Pomeroy 5 -- Dr. Pomeroy received bachelors and medical degrees from the University
of Michigan; she is currently professor emerita at UC Davis. Dr. Pomeroy was chief of
infectious diseases and associate dean for research and informatics at the University of
Kentucky. (“Redefining Public and Private in the Framework of a Gendered Equality”
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/courses/knowbody/f04/web3/cpomeroy.html)//CC
The public/private distinction is meant to mark the legitimate limits of state action, although it can serve other purposes as well.
(Weintraub and Kumar 1997, ch. 1). But that distinction feminists often fear, is impossible to reconcile with the equality of men and
women – or with principles of democratic government.1 Indeed, the feminist slogan that the personal is political
neatly encapsulates both the theoretical problem of conceptualising the public/private
distinction in democratic terms, and the practical results of our failures to do so. The slogan that
the personal is political was a protest against sexual injustice and a challenge to the main
obstacles to removing it which feminists had encountered. It was a protest against the violence,
exploitation and humiliation that characterised so much of women’s lives not only in the workplace, or
as members of political organisations and movements, but in the home and, more broadly, in their sexual and domestic relations
with men. It was a protest, in other words, against practices quite common in the 1960s and 1970s – such as the exclusion of
women from the professions, and from higher education, or the difficulties that they
encountered if they wished to set up a bank account in their own name, and to get paid
adequately for work that they had done. It was, as well, a protest against the difficulties that they faced if they wished to
delay or even forego, marriage and child-bearing, and the high price that was demanded of them if they did so in social exclusion,
ostracism, harassment and intimidation.2 But the slogan that the personal is political was, as well, a way of
encapsulating women’s insights into the ways that these practices had been justified in the past,
and into the obstacles to overcoming them in the present. For it neatly and accurately summarised the idea
not only that women are victims of injustice, but that these injustices have political causes,
consequences and remedies, and should be treated as such. They have political causes, because
sexual inequality is not simply a personal misfortune that falls from the sky, or the product of the personal
deficiencies of particular women and men, but the predictable, and sometimes intentional, result of the ways in which societies
distribute and justify power over others. But, once
one grants the claim that the personal is political, it is
hard to see what the public/private distinction could be referring to, or what could possibly by
the point and justification of privacy rights. If the personal identities, aspirations and relations of individuals are
fundamentally shaped by political factors, and have important political consequences, then normatively and empirically it will be
hard to determine what, if anything, is personal rather than political. These
problems are well illustrated by the
limitations of contemporary justifications of privacy rights. These limitations reflect the seemingly endless, and
apparently irresolvable, controversies amongst lawyers and legal theorists over Brandeis’ claim that common law protection for
privacy is not reducible to torts against defamation, theft, misappropriation and misrepresentation.3 It dominates discussion of the
extent to which the
US constitution supports a distinctive right to privacy that is not simply a right to
marry, procreate and be free from certain ways in which government can intimidate, threaten
and demoralise its opponents.4 In each case, what is at issue is this: the coherence of thinking that
individuals have a distinctive set of interests that can count as privacy interests, and the
justification for believing that, so described, these interests merit legal protection by right.
Framework
Individual action key
Legislation cannot create sustainable change – must individually break privacy
of violence against women
Jones 05 – Helen Jones works for the Institute of Culture, Gender and the City, in
Manchester University. (“Visible Rights: Watching Out for Women” pg. 592-593,
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3366/3329)//CC
The body is directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold
upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform
ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault, 1977:25) Our bodies may present the uniqueness of an
individual but, through being observed, monitored and controlled, they also serve to
demonstrate collective identities. Seen in this way, our bodies are projects which may claim or subvert identity;
alternatively, control over the body may be taken and identity negated. The body, as represented within any particular culture, will
reflect the values and anxieties of that culture. To use the example of Afghanistan, the burka provides a symbol of the anxieties
about the strict social boundaries that existed between men and women. In the West there are assumed to be more relaxed
boundaries. But, across the globe, violence continues. After military conflicts have ended, women continue to endure violence. The
private realm of the home, free from surveillance and outside interference, provides the privacy necessary for domestic violence.
The World Health Organization suggests that “in many countries that have suffered violent conflict, the rates of interpersonal
violence remain high even after the cessation of hostilities – among other reasons because of the way violence has become more
socially acceptable” (2002: 15). Even where the end of hostilities is brought by peacekeeping forces women are not safe. The power
of the military to control the peace extends to controlling the abuse of women. Amnesty International provide examples of Kosovo
where women have been trafficked into the country for forced prostitution by the military, Somalia where a teenage girl was bought
as a birthday present for a Belgian paratrooper and reports of sexual violence committed by Italian peacekeeping forces in
Mozambique (Amnesty International, 2004:54-5). Nation states have duties under international law to respect, protect and fulfil
women’s rights: in other words, to take effective steps to stop violence against women. Governments
continue to fail
to demonstrate due diligence, regardless of the mass of information that is known. On a
local level, justice systems often fail to deliver justice despite clear evidence. Although
legislation may exist to protect women in theory, social tolerance of violence, cultural
norms and a lack of political will, often combine to nullify the law in practice. Invisible
women suffer invisible violence and violators act with impunity, because police forces
are uninterested, justice systems are expensive and are ridden with discriminatory
attitudes. An example of this can be found in Spain when, in 1995, Rita Margarete Rogerio was raped by a police officer.
Despite a lower court finding it “luminously clear” that she had been raped, the Supreme Court acquitted the implicated officers
(Amnesty International, 2004: 83). International scrutiny is therefore useful in holding states to account and the creation of the
International Criminal Court has increased the potential for crimes of violence against women to be addressed. Women’s rights
groups recognize the limitations, not only of local level legislation, but also of international conventions, treaties and courts to
protect women from violence. Fortunately campaigning by women’s rights activists continues to scrutinize and challenge violence
against women. Violence
against women exists everywhere but it is not an inevitable feature
of life for all. The power to invade the private realm of women’s bodies is not
easily curtailed by scrutiny and surveillance or by policies and legislation but campaigns are having an
impact. Whether the violence is committed in war, in terror, by governments, by
‘peacekeepers’ or by husbands in the privacy of the home, what is known is that
violence against women, throughout the globe, has become more visible, due to the
challenges from women speaking out and demanding to break the silence of privacy
that underpins violence against women. Privacy is sustained by lack of accountability at
the level of the state, the community and the individual. Only by opening each level up
to scrutiny will violence against women begin to be achieved.
Answers To:
A2: Perm
Reinforcing privacy in any way reaffirms the noninterference of the state – state
action in the social sphere is necessary to check normalized sexism that enables
oppression of women
Mackinnon 83 - Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University Of Michigan Law School, Visiting professor of
law at Harvard Law School... (Charlotte; “Privacy vs. Equality: Beyond Roe vs. Wade”;
http://politicalscience.tamu.edu/documents/faculty/MacKinnon-Privacy_v_Equality.pdf )//KM
It is not inconsistent, then, that framed as a privacy right, a woman’s decision to abort would have no claim on public support
Privacy conceived as a right against public
intervention and disclosure is the opposite of the relief that Harris sought for welfare women.
State intervention would have provided a choice women did not have in private. The women in
Harris, women whose sexual refusal has counted for particularly little, needed something to make their privacy
effective,’ 9The logic of the Court’s response resembles the logic by which women are supposed to consent to sex. Preclude
the alternatives, then call the sole remaining option “her choice.” The point is that the alternatives are precluded
prior to the reach of the chosen legal doctrine. They are precluded by conditions of sex, race, and class—the
very conditions the privacy frame not only leaves tacit but exists to guarantee. When the law of privacy restricts
intrusions into intimacy, it bars change in control over that intimacy. The existing distribution of
power and resources within the private sphere will be precisely what the law of privacy exists to
protect. It is probably not coincidence that the very things feminism regards as central to the subjection of women—the
and would genuinely not be seen as burdened by that deprivation.
very place, the body; the very relations, heterosexual; the very activities, intercourse and reproduction; and the very feelings,
intimate—form the core of what is covered by privacy doctrine. From this perspective, the
legal concept of privacy
has shielded the place of battery marital rape, and women’s exploited labor has
preserved the central institutions whereby women are deprived of identity, autonomy, control
and self-definition; and has protected the primary activity through which male supremacy is
expressed and enforced. Just as pornography is legally protected as individual freedom of expression—without
questioning whose freedom and whose expression and at whose expense—abstract privacy protects abstract
autonomy, without inquiring into whose freedom of action is being sanctioned at whose
can and
expense. To fail to recognize the meaning of the private is in the ideology and
reality of women’s subordination by seeking protection behind a right to that
privacy is to cut women off from collective verification and state support in
the same act.
I think this has a lot to do with why we can’t organize women on the abortion issue. When
women
are segregated in private, separated from each other, one at a time, a right to that privacy isolates
us at once from each other and from public recourse. This right to privacy is a right of men “to be let
alone” 20 to oppress women one at a time. It embodies and reflects the private sphere’s existing definition of
womanhood. This is an instance of liberalism called feminism, liberalism applied to women as if we are persons, gender
neutral.
It reinforces the division between public and private that is not gender neutral. It is at
once an ideological division that lies about women’s shared experience and that mystifies the
unity among the spheres of women’s violation. It is a very material division that keeps the
private beyond public redress and depoliticizes women’s subjection within it. It keeps some men
out of the bedrooms of other men.
Concept of privacy cannot be reformed – women will always be oppressed
Kelly ’03 - Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at UCONN. (Kristin A.,
Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy, ed. By K. Kelly. P. 39)//JS
If the state regulation of sex and procreation suggested by MacKinnon and Firestone would to come about, the private sphere
would (as it currently understood) cease to exist. Domestic violence would no longer be treated as a private dispute between a
man and a woman but as a manifestation of an unacceptable pattern of domination meriting political action. The elimination of
activities now treated as presumptively private would not disturb either theorist, for each views the distinction between
public and private is a little more than an ideal logical construction design to naturalize and disguise the exploitation of
women as a class. From this perspective, whatever
benefits might accrue from keeping the state
out of the realm of familial and sexual relations become irrelevant in the face of the
violence insubordination that women inevitability experience when such activities
are left unregulated. MacKinnon makes this point explicit: "feminist translation the private is a sphere
of battery, martial rape, and woman's exploited labor; it is the central social institution where
my woman is deprived of (as men are granted) identity, autonomy, Control, and selfdetermination." The majority of feminist theorists who have given their attention to the
public/private split are in agreement with MacKinnon's basic argument that privacy, at least in its
current configuration, has significantly contributed to the subordination of women in general and
more specifically to unacceptable rates of violence against women within the context of intimate
relationships. The aspects of her work that receives much less support in her assertion- made also by Firestone- that the
oppression of women will always result from strict boundaries between public and private, and
therefor the distinction should be eliminated.
Revisions to right to privacy fail
Lever 97 - Associate Professor of Normative Political Theory in the Department of
Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland. (Annabelle; “A Democratic perception of Privacy”;
http://alever.net/DOCS/A%20Democratic%20Conception%20of%20Privacy.pdf)//KM
The claim that Roe illustrates the incompatibility of privacy and equality assumes that we must reject the right to privacy
because it justifies a distinction between the personal and political aspects of social life which maintains the subordination of
women to men. I will refer to this claim as “the conflict thesis”, because it holds that rights to privacy must conflict with the
equality of women and men. The
right to privacy is thought to be incompatible with equality because it
gives individuals rights of personal choice in sexual and familial relations, and so carves out an
area of social life – the private realm or sphere – into which the state may not enter. Thus, the
right to privacy implies that we can distinguish the personal from the political, and that intimate
and familial relations are private rather than political matters. But this feminists deny. They claim
that relations of domination and subordination characterize the sexual and familial relations of
individuals, and that the division of power within families is a political matter.11 They claim that the
sexual division of labor and income within the family denies women social equality with men,
and licenses the exploitation and coercion of women in all areas of social life. Egalitarian reform
of the family, they argue, is necessary if women are to become the social equals of men. This,
they believe, is incompatible with the assumption that familial and sexual relations are private. For
those who endorse the conflict thesis – and some feminists do not12 – there is no way to revise the content
and justification of the right to privacy that would make it compatible with sexual
equality. For in societies marked by pervasive sexual inequality, such as our own, there is no
way to distinguish the personal from the political. Nor is it possible to separate those features of our intimate
and familial relations which disadvantage women from those which do not. Thus, some feminists believe, the right to
privacy cannot be made compatible with sexual equality, because we lack the means to
distinguish the personal from the political without justifying sexual inequality. The conflict thesis, I
believe, supports a distinctive objection to the Supreme Court's reasoning in Roe. It asserts that Roe’s justification of abortion
rights is incompatible with the equality of women and men. Though assuming that women have a right to abortion, and not
denying the constitutionality of Roe, this objection implies that there should be no legal right to privacy and that Roe’s
justification of abortion is philosophically inadequate. It implies that women have a right to abortion because they are the
moral equals of men, and that this right is necessary to treat women as the equals of men. Finally, it suggests that the Roe
Court could have, and should have, defended the constitutionality of abortion from the constitution’s guarantees of equal
protection for individuals, rather than by recourse to the right to privacy. Thus, the claim that Roe shows the incompatibility of
privacy and equality raises intriguing philosophical and constitutional questions, ones which differ from more familiar
controversies about abortion rights, but which appear of considerable relevance to these. The constitutional questions raised
by the conflict thesis are important, but I will not address them here. Instead, I will be looking at the philosophical aspects of
the thesis, attempting to clarify and assess the philosophical reasons for believing that the right to privacy must justify
inequality. I believe this warranted both by the significance of the philosophical aspects of the conflict thesis and because these
can be distinguished sufficiently from its constitutional aspects to enable us treat them separately. For legal and moral rights
are not necessarily the same, even if they share the same name.
A2: Women in Public Sphere Solves Oppression
Women’s perspectives are trivialized as “private or women’s issues” in
traditional public sphere – liberal legalism doesn’t solve oppression
Pomeroy 5 - Dr. Pomeroy received bachelors and medical degrees from the University
of Michigan; she is currently professor emerita at UC Davis. Dr. Pomeroy was chief of
infectious diseases and associate dean for research and informatics at the University of
Kentucky. (“Redefining Public and Private in the Framework of a Gendered Equality”
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/courses/knowbody/f04/web3/cpomeroy.html)//CC
As more women have entered the work force, and thus the public sphere, there has been an
increasing focus on how this movement influences the idea of the traditional private life. Since the
Industrial Revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men have been defined as the money-making
workers and women as the child-bearing emotional support for men. In this traditional model "the ability
of the unencumbered individual (man) to participate in the public sphere of work and politics assumes that someone, usually a
woman, is preparing his food, cleaning his house, and raising the next generation of laborers through her reproductive labor." The
expectation that child care will be done 'for free' by the mother in the home is connected to the lack of publicly funded day care that
would enable women to work outside the home as well as the underpaid nature of child care labor. In the same vein, the
devaluation of child care and the work of nurturing also serve to undervalue the work performed by women in the labor force.
With women moving out of the house and into the labor market, the traditional model is
challenged. To compensate for this, the division between private and public is being refined. The
shifting division between the public and private spheres results in an unclear distinction
between the two, and the manner by which this division is refined is connected to the state. In the
course of history, women's voices have been silenced in the public arena. This silencing is due
significantly to that which defines them as women and to which they are inescapably linked:
their sexuality, their natality, and their body. These three things helped situate women in the
private realm. Linked with public/private is the political/apolitical dichotomy which closes
women into an experience of the apolitical private, consequently overlooking women's
distinctive experiences in politics. To combat this, women's voices have entered the political realm to
protest for legislation that addresses the structural oppression they experience as women
because of their association with the private. Women have been the primary proponents to the creation of better
child care, better paid maternity and paternity leave, and equal pay in all occupational fields; all things that push the feminist agenda
of equality for the sexes. Unfortunately, in
politics, women's concerns and demands are regarded as
reflections of moral or familial commitment, rather than an authentically political stance. Their
issues are deemed "women's issues," thereby trivializing the issues. In doing so, these issues
become "women's problems" and can be more easily bypassed by the male-dominated political
system. In truth, however, these initiatives are to work to balance the public and private lives of
everyone, so that the shift between private and public can be stabilized. The politicization of women's
voices has dual function. In part, it perpetuates the male/female dichotomy by creating gendered spaces
within the public realm by creating "women's issues" as a political agenda, which rests outside
mainstream (male) politics. At the same time, it causes women to adopt masculinized voices to be
taken seriously within mainstream politics. In the discussing of politics, their female perspective cannot be brought
into their argument, because if it is, the argument will be devalued. If their prospective is not female and is presented in the male
dominated setting of politics, it is likely that they will present their ideas from a male perspective, so that the people who are being
presented to (males) can identify with what the woman is saying. The masculinization of women occurs in all public areas, including
the work force. To be taken as serious workers, women must dress in a masculine manner, cannot mention the existence of their
children and can never leave work to address familial responsibilities. This creates a double edge sword for working mothers;
socioeconomic structures reinforce women's primary responsibility for day care while gender-neutral family laws tend not to
acknowledge the continuing nature of care giving. Women are increasingly expected to work what Arlie Hochschild has named "the
second shift."
A2: No Single Feminist Answer
Even if not all feminists agree, there is consensus that the public/private
dichotomy is harmful to women
Kelly ’03 - Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at UCONN. (Kristin A.,
Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy, ed. By K. Kelly. P. 37)//JS
There is no single critique that can be labeled the feminist position on why the
public/private split is problematic for women, and particularly on how the split contributes to violence
against women within the domestic realm. However, there is significant consensus that the split
exists and is harmful to women, and that it is a social construction that frequently
serves ideological purposes, however, disagreements and contradictions abound. To make sense of this debate,
it is instructive to look at some of the chief positions taken, particularly relative to efforts to redraw
the boundaries of public and private as a means of reducing violence against women. Three sets of solutions- radical,
conservative, and liberal feminist- each provide a distinct reformulation of the public/private split.
A2: Men can’t be allies
Men must take responsibility to for resistance to end oppression – need male
allies
hooks 15 – former Professor of African-American Studies and English at Yale
University and Associate Professor of Women's Studies and American Literature at
Oberlin College, writer of over 30 books on the subject of feminism and oppression
(bell, “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.83, 3rd edition 2015) //DS
Snodgrass participated in the men’s consciousness-raising groups and edited the book of readings in 1977. Towards the end of
the 1970s interest male anti-sexist groups declined.
Even though more men than ever before support
the idea of social equality for women, like women they do not see this support as
synonymous with efforts to end sexist oppression, with feminist movement that would radically
transform society. Men who advocate feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression
must become more vocal and public in their opposition to sexism and sexist
oppression. Until men share equal responsibility for struggling to end sexism,
feminist movement will reflect the very sexist contradictions we wish to eradicate.
Separatist ideology encourages us to believe that women alone can make feminist
revolution – we cannot. Since men are the primary agents maintaining and supporting
sexism and sexist oppression, they can only be successfully eradicated if men are compelled to
assume responsibility for transforming their consciousness and the consciousness
of society as a whole. After hundreds of years of anti-racist struggle, more than ever before non-white people are
currently calling attention to the primary role white people must play in anti-racist struggle. The same is true of the struggle to
eradicate sexism – men
have a primary role to play. This does not mean that they are
better equipped to lead the feminist movement, but it does mean that they should share
equally in resistance struggle. In particular, men have a tremendous contribution to
make to feminist struggle in the area of exposing, confronting, opposing, and
transforming the sexism of their male peers. When men show a willingness to assume equal
responsibility in feminist struggle, performing whatever tasks are necessary, women should
revolutionary work by acknowledging them as comrades in struggle.
affirm their
A2: Terrorism Impact
Gender equality solves terrorism – amount and magnitude of attacks are
directly correlated with gender equality within countries
Becker 10 – (Emily Becker is a writer on the subject of gender equality and its
correlation with other statistics, Women and terrorism : how does the treatment of
women affect rates of terrorism?,” pg. 883, 884, 2010,
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553645/beck
erEmily.pdf?sequence=1)//EM
The benefits to economic development of gender equality and empowering women,
however, have long been accepted and proven. Coleman (2004) highlights many of the
costs associated with lack of gender equality. For starters, only half the human capital in
a country is being used. Coleman also states, without any evidence, that “the U.S. is increasingly
embracing 10 women’s rights, as a way not only to foster democracy, but also to
promote development, curb extremism, and fight terrorism” (Coleman, 2004, p. 80).
Coleman links women’s rights to lower rates of terrorism because “societies that
marginalize women generally count both fewer antiauthoritarian voices in politics
and more men who join fanatical religious and political brotherhoods” (Coleman, 2004,
p86). Again, the relationship is stated as fact, yet no such research exists. This thesis examined the
relationship between gender equality and terrorism expressly to demonstrate a link
between gender inequality and the lack of women’s empowerment and higher rates
of terrorism. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are often used interchangeably but are in fact different
concepts. Buvicic and Morrison (2008) explain the way the World Bank measures the two concepts and the importance of
considering both measures when looking holistically at the status of women in a society. Gender
equality is a
relative measure: women might compare equally to men in a given trait, such as
literacy. Empowerment is an absolute measure that examines variables such as
educational achievement, political rights, and access to reproductive health care. The
third goal of the World Bank’s Millennium Declaration was “to promote gender equality and empower women.”
(www.worldbank.org) The two are related and this thesis included both measures in the analysis of how the status of women
(as measured by both gender equality and women’s empowerment) affects the rates of terrorism. If
the link between
gender equality, women’s empowerment and terrorism (which is already accepted
by the U.S. government) is supported by the evidence, it reinforces the current U.S.
policy of promoting women’s rights and directing foreign aid at programs that help
women, not only because these programs improve economic development but also
for their benefit to national security. If improving the lives of women is shown to
reduce terrorism, not only does 11 the U.S. government have yet another reason to
pursue a morally astute policy, it also provides another way to combat terrorism.
Privacy K Aff
Link Turns
Surveillance = Inequity
Surveillance creates a false sense of security – perpetuates gender oppression
Monahan ’10 – Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, director of the international Surveillance Studies Network,
associate editor of the leading academic journal on surveillance, Surveillance and
Society (Torin, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, p.10-11)//MA
Surveillance intersects with security in interesting ways. Often, surveillance is depicted as a tool for
safeguarding security, ranging from biometric systems at airports to nannycams in homes. Discourses about
surveillance and security typically present false trade-offs, frequently between security and privacy. This framing implies
that surveillance works as promised, that people can make rational choices about adopting surveillance or
exposing themselves to it, and that surveillance will not create new insecurities or
problematic situations. Most of the time, people are given little or no choice but to
submit to surveillance, whether for purposes of national security, market research, theft
prevention, or employee monitoring. Additionally, because surveillance is often not efficacious for
preventing terrorism or crime, only for identifying perpetrators after the fact, the presence of such systems
may evoke a false sense of security at great financial cost. Finally, just because surveillance may
not necessarily work as intended does not mean that it does not work to produce social relations and spaces. The increase
of voyeuristic monitoring of women by men, for example, whether in official video surveillance control
rooms or with cell phone cameras on the street, is one unanticipated result of surveillance that can
subject women to new forms of harassment and make social spaces more hostile
than they were previously. In spite of these and other caveats, the relationship of surveillance to
security is usually discussed as abstracted from social context, thereby obstructing
any analysis of the political economy or the complexity and multiplicity of modern
insecurities.
Surveillance reinforces inequality – applied disproportionately to marginalized
areas
Monahan ’10 – Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, director of the international Surveillance Studies Network,
associate editor of the leading academic journal on surveillance, Surveillance and
Society (Torin, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, p.10)//MA
The second mechanism by which surveillance reinforces inequalities is through differential
exposure to surveillance systems based on one's social address. Unlike the social sorting
examples given above, where people are often treated differently by the same technological systems, many systems of
surveillance are disproportionately applied to marginalized populations. Examples could
include systems for tracking and controlling the purchases of welfare recipients,
routine drug testing for workers in low-paying service jobs, intrusive screening of students in
inner-city public schools, or the remote monitoring of employees by managers with global positioning systems,
key- stroke-tracking software, or radio-frequency identification tags. This general form of surveillance, which could be
called marginalizing surveillance, demonstrates an explicit power relationship of
enhanced control of populations considered to be risky, dangerous, or
untrustworthy. In the process, marginalizing surveillance affixes those
characteristics to the objects of surveillance, thereby reifying identities of suspicion
and legitimizing the ongoing selective deployment of surveillance. For instance, if one
scrutinizes welfare recipients to determine if they are "cheating the system" in some way (for
example, by not reporting some cash income), one will likely find instances to support this
suspicion. This can, in turn, legitimize the further surveillance of those populations
without any, consideration, necessarily of the next-to-impossible rules imposed upon welfare recipients to begin with. Both
social sorting and marginalizing surveillance illustrate that the profusion
of surveillance technologies
throughout societies in no way indicates the democratization of surveillance.
Surveillance both grows out of and gives rise to power relations and specific institutional configurations, which are predicated
more and more upon the mitigation of financial or legal risk to government and corporate entities.
Surveillance as a tool of social sorting – viewing technology as neutral masks its
inherent discrimination
Monahan ’10 – Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, director of the international Surveillance Studies Network,
associate editor of the leading academic journal on surveillance, Surveillance and
Society (Torin, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, p.9-10)//MA
Broadly speaking, there are two mechanisms by which surveillance can establish or sustain social
inequalities. The first is what scholars in the field of surveillance studies refer to as social sorting. As
Emile Durkheim noted a century ago, modern societies depend upon differentiation among
people, especially in regard to function or specialization. Contemporary surveillance technologies are
tools of societal differentiation. They serve simultaneously to diagnose someone's
"proper" place in society and to pressure people not to deviate from their assigned
categories. Although social sorting with surveillance can be seen with regard to any
perceived or actual difference among people (such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or age), capitalist
measures of status and place predominate. These can include preferential treatment of
the relatively affluent in domains of commodity consumption, with discounts based on past purchases;
transportation, with dedicated toll roads and lanes for those who can pay; communication, with higher
bandwidth and priority data routing for elite subscribers; energy access, with budget
plans for "low-risk" groups, compared with pay-as-you-go plans with added surcharges for "high-risk" groups;
housing, with screening for "desirability" by home owners' associations and lenders; and so on. What is new about these
trends are the fine-grained levels of differentiation and the automation of social
sorting made possible by
ubiquitous ICTs. Unlike social sorting practices of the past, which were obviously discriminatory, such as the use of
passbooks in apartheid South Africa, the technological mediation of social sorting masks
discrimination because people tend to think of technological systems as neutral
rather than inherently biased.
Men use surveillance for voyeuristic purposes, which objectifies women
Monahan 08--Associate professor of human and organizational development and
associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. (Torin Monahan, Dreams
of Control at a Distance: Gender, Surveillance, and Social Control, ed. by T. Monahan,
p.11-13)//SJ
The research that has been done on video surveillance provides the ground- work for addressing gender issues with other surveillance
The voyeuristic uses of video surveillance are not all that surprising: Usually
men sit comfortably in control rooms where they monitor unsuspecting women—and
others—from afar. Studies confirm that at least one in 10 women are watched by
control room operators for voyeuristic reasons alone (Norris & Armstrong, 1997). One effect is what Hille
Koskela (2000) has called a masculinization of space, whereby women in public and private spaces are
technologies.
increasingly scrutinized without necessarily achieving any additional protection
from harassment or assault. Indeed, in some cases, it seems as if the bundling of cameras into
popular devices like cellular phones enables new forms of uninvited scrutiny and
objectification of women. One example of such practices occurred at my previous university where pictures are
taken of female students, without their awareness or consent, and then placed on an
Internet site for viewers from around the world to “rate” their sex appeal.
Surveillance is gendered in private and public spaces – used to control women’s
bodies
Monahan 08--Associate professor of human and organizational development and
associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. (Torin Monahan, Dreams
of Control at a Distance: Gender, Surveillance, and Social Control, ed. by T. Monahan,
p.3-4)//SJ
Inquiry into context or use discrimination focuses attention on discrimination that is engendered by existing social contexts and/or institutional
Because almost all control room operators of
video surveillance are men who are removed from the spaces they are monitoring,
they tend to use the technologies in voyeuristic and particularistic ways. As Hille Koskela
relations. Surveillance technologies fit neatly within this frame.
(2000, 2002) argued, this
effectively masculinizes the spaces under observation because (a) video
surveillance occurs in traditionally feminine spaces (e.g., of shopping, public transportation, etc.); (b) it serves
as a hidden form of sexual harassment; and (c) unlike the physical presence of security personnel, video
surveillance operators fail to detect or document verbal forms of sexual harassment
that may be occurring in those spaces. When social contexts are already marked by sexist relations, then surveillance
(and other) technologies tend to amplify those tensions and inequalities. Lorraine Bayard de Volo (2003) wrote, for example,
about the uses of surveillance to control the appearance and behavior of cocktail waitresses in
casinos. The intention is to position waitresses as objects of desire for customers, by
way of their dress and doting upon gamblers, and to keep them subordinate to the male
bartenders and management. Waitresses do resist, but cautiously and intelligently, otherwise bartenders will
slow waitresses’ orders down and their tips will suffer. R. Danielle Egan (2004) found a similar pattern
with the use of surveillance in strip clubs to enforce control by male managers over female strippers, making certain that they do not cheat the
the
construction of women as vulnerable in public places such as outdoor recreational
parks compels them to begrudgingly accept surveillance in exchange for the alleged
promise of increased safety.
system by taking unreported tips (usually for performing sexual acts). Finally, Jennifer Wesely and Emily Gaardner (2004) explained how
Surveillance is gendered—masculine control over technology and location
focused on areas primarily trafficked by women
Koskela 2K-professor at Department of Geography, University of Helskini. (Hille Koskela,
‘The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space,”
“Progress of Human Geography,” p.254-255)//SJ
In public and semi-public space, the places where surveillance most often occurs are, as
mentioned above, the shopping malls and the shopping areas of city centres and , likewise, areas of
public transport (such as underground stations, railway stations and busy bus stops). The people who usually
negotiate and decide upon surveillance are the management: managers of shopping malls, leading politicians,
city mayors, etc. Furthermore, the people who maintain surveillance are the police and private guards.
From this it is possible to draw some conclusions about the gender structure of surveillance. Women spend more time
shopping than men, and everyday purchases are mostly bought by women (Reeves, 1996: 138). The
majority of the users of public transport are women (Hill, 1996; Kaartokallio, 1997). Thus women quite often
occupy the typical places of surveillance. By contrast, those in charge of deciding on surveillance are usually
men. More importantly, those who maintain surveillance (the police and guards) are also mostly men. Thus, at
the simplest level, surveillance is, indeed, gendered: most of the people ‘behind’ the cameras are men and most of the
people ‘under’ surveillance are women. However, there are other, more complicated features, of this gender structure. In the world
of surveillance the
‘masculine culture’ of technology (Wajcman, 1991) is reproduced in the masculine
interiors of monitoring rooms as well as in the recruitment of guards for their physical strength
and for their tall, muscular appearance rather than suitable schooling or their ability to cope with people. The ‘cop
culture’ (e.g., Fyfe, 1995) is producing mistrust of surveillance: women do not rely on those behind the cameras
because the guards and the police responsible for the daily routine of surveillance reproduce patriarchal forms of power.
Surveillance is interpreted as part of ‘male policing in the boardest sense’ (Brown, 1998: 217). To understand the ways in which the
power-space of surveillance is gendered, we need to specify the dimensions of the visual – of ‘the gaze’.
Surveillance reproduces male power -- past incidents prove
Koskela 2K- professor at Department of Geography, University of Helskini (Hille Koskela, ‘The
gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space,” “Progress of Human Geography,” p.255-256)//SJ
As has already been argued, since video-surveillance usually reduces everything to the visual, it is
unable to identify
situations where more sensitive interpretation is needed . For example, surveillance overseers can easily
observe clearly visible but otherwise minor offences while ignoring situations they might regard as ambivalent, such as (verbal)
sexual harassment (Koskela, 2000). Most
cameras are unable to interpret threatening situations
that are not visually recognizable, and therefore cases of harassment often go
unnoticed. Sexual harassment is more difficult to identify, and to interrupt, by surveillance camera than by the police/guards
patrolling on foot. This insensitivity of the cameras – i.e., restriction within the field of vision – is an
important reason for doubt and disorientation. ‘The gaze’ becomes gendered. It has been
shown that there is public concern about the ‘potential ‘Peeping Tom’ element’ (Honess and Charman, 1992: 9), that women are
worried about possible ‘voyeurism’ (Trench, 1997: 149; Brown, 1998: 218), and that cameras positioned in places of an intimate
nature irritate women (Koskela, 2000). In addition, there
is anecdotal evidence of the camera abuse. Hillier
(1996: 99–100) describes the case of Burswood Casino in Australia, where the security camera operators had
videotaped women in toilets and artists’ changing rooms, zooming in on the exposed
parts of their bodies and editing the video sequences on to one tape that was shown at local
house parties. In like manner, in the summer of 1997 it was discovered that Swedish conscript solders had been
‘entertaining’ themselves by monitoring topless women on a beach near their navy base, taping the women and
printing pictures of them to hang on the barrack walls (Helsingin Sanomat, 17 December 1997). The
cameras used were of extremely high quality and, hence, the pictures were quite explicit. These cases (the latter now being
investigated as a crime) are glaring examples of the possibility of the masculinization and
militarization of space, of the gendering of surveillance and of the abuse of control .
Furthermore, surveillance does not replace or erase other forms of embodiment: women still encounter sexual harassment and
objectifying attitudes in their face-to-face contacts in urban space.
Surveillance might be a way of reproducing
and reinforcing male power. It is ‘opening up new possibilities for harassment’ (Ainley, 1998: 92). Surveillance can be
understood as the ‘re-embodiment’ of women, as ‘an extension of male gaze’. It has been suggested that more knowledge is needed
about ‘how disciplinary power operates in connection with other tools of class and gender oppression’ (Hannah, 1997a: 179).
Arguably, the practice of surveillance could contribute to perpetuating the existing imbalance in gender relations, rather than
challenging it. The
powerspace is gendered.
Surveillance Prioritizes Nat’l Security/Structural Violence
Surveillance perpetuates belief that national security should be prioritized over
structural violence
Monahan ’10 – Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, director of the international Surveillance Studies Network,
associate editor of the leading academic journal on surveillance, Surveillance and
Society (Torin, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, p.11)//MA
Placed in context, specifically in a neoliberal context, surveillance can be interpreted instead as
contributing to individual and collective fears and dictating specific market-oriented
responses to them. Scholars have found, for instance, that the presence of surveillance
cameras can generate experiences of fear in people who presume there must be a discernable
threat to which the cameras are responding. Security companies have both generated and fed off public
fears to grow into a $215-billion industry, catering to government agencies, businesses, and individuals alike with their hightech security "solutions.” Surveillance melds with other forms of fortification as well, such as walls, to regulate inclusion and
exclusion as a form of risk management. The
empirical validity of such risks is apparently
irrelevant. For example, statistically speaking, schools continue to be some of the safest places for
children, much safer than the home, the street, or other settings, yet the demand for surveillance systems
and police in schools has reached an all-time high. The convergence of surveillance and
neoliberalism supports the production of insecurity subjects, of people who perceive the
inherent dangerousness of others and take actions to minimize exposure to them, even when the danger is spurious. Social
exclusions and inequalities become mere collateral damage in the battle for the semblance of
personal safety, not political problems for which society shares collective responsibility.
Current surveillance state based in insecurity ignores the role of structural
conditions in inequality
Monahan ’10 – Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, director of the international Surveillance Studies Network,
associate editor of the leading academic journal on surveillance, Surveillance and
Society (Torin, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, p.6)//MA
Meanwhile, terrorist threats have come to epitomize modern insecurity. Instead of presenting discernable
risks that can be calculated, predicted, and controlled, terrorism is an effective tactic precisely because it
appears irrational and unpredictable. It produces maximum affective shock and fear on a
subjective and personal level, while simultaneously generating images and stories that can circulate widely, infecting others
with their contagion. Whereas the “risk society” concept, as originally formulated by Ulrich Beck, focused on technological
systems whose risks exceed the capacity of the institutions charged with managing them (such as nuclear, chemical, and
biotechnology industries), terrorism—especially suicide-based attacks—defies institutions on an altogether different plane.
Terrorism is an assault on institutions and governments through human and technological means, through fusing of people
with weapons, through the killing or maiming of innocent civilians, and through the creation of fearful citizens and reactionary
governments.
for the United States, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 engendered a certain configuration of a
security state, operating symbolically around the “war on terror”; institutionally through the
At least
creation of the Department of Homeland Security to consolidate and reorient government agencies toward security
operations; legally around “states of exception,” most notably for preemptive war, domestic surveillance, and the torture of
terrorist suspects; and practically through the establishment of elaborate surveillance rituals for citizens (for example, airport
screening) and the outsourcing of lucrative security contracts to private industries. In these ways, the
“war on
terror” has become the central layer through which all conceivable national security
threats are filtered and weighed for importance, which can be seen readily with the specious conflation of terrorism
with illegal immigration, identity theft, and even public protest.
The framing
of insecurity around terrorism tends to occlude, among other things, the role of
structural conditions in producing inequality and violence. Economic globalization,
especially, has catalyzed a greater degree of job insecurity and inequality among people
within countries, even as the inequality among countries appears to be diminishing.
One interpretation of this is that multinational corporations and the affluent tend to be profiting handsomely
from economic globalization, whereas the majority of people have become vulnerable.
Similarly, while travel across borders has increased dramatically, some people commute for
business or pleasure with relative ease while others flee ethnic violence and poverty only to find fortified
borders and hostile immigration policies blocking their paths. These trends are, of course, interlinked. In current
incarnations of economic globalization, deterritorialized capital, which can be seen with the outsourcing of jobs
and offshoring of factories, combines with neoliberal policies in other countries, which provide a
fertile ground for corporate profit even while the standard of living and job security of
most people in so-called developing and developed countries is actually diminishing. In response
to human insecurity brought about by deterritorialized capital and expropriated national
resources, mobility of the subaltern--whether as immigrants or refugees--becomes a
survival tactic that is typically viewed as threatening to the integrity of nation states.
Perms
Feminist Re-imagining
Perm – do the plan and a feminist re-imagination of privacy – solves oppressive
uses of privacy.
McClain 99 – Paul Siskind research scholar and professor of law at Boston
University, (Linda, “Reconstructive Tasks for a Liberal Feminist Conception of
Privacy,” 40.3, (1999), p.771-774, William and Mary Law Review Journal) //DS
The second, related paradigm begins with the legacy of the denial of meaningful privacy to women (especially within
marriage). Notwithstanding feminist critiques of privacy, Allen’s important work on the normative value of privacy and
we might enlist women’s experiences with “bad” forms of
privacy and the absence of “significant opportunities” for privacy and private choice to argue for the goods of privacy.82
She persuasively argues that an adequate account of privacy should rid itself of the legacy of domestic
life as the sphere of confinement, subordination, and sacrifice of self.63 One part of
women’s privacy problem has been too much of the wrong kind of privacyunwanted isolation, the legacy of separate spheres and of norms of maternal self-sacrifice, the brutal injustice of the
private choice for women suggests that
law’s drawing the curtain on private life, and leaving married women largely unprotected against inti-mate violence.“ As Allen
“Privacy” can play a significant role
in fostering self-development and affording a space in which persons prepare
themselves for roles, relationships, and responsibilities, while allowing the
realization of goods such as solitude, chosen intimacy, and retreat.“ “Private choice,” or
decisional privacy, can allow women the development and exercise of their moral
powers.”
In effect, what privacy affords is the literal and metaphorical space or opportunity
for self-development or self-constitution, as well as for revision of the self. I believe (as
has argued, women have not had enough of the right kind of privacy.65
does Allen) that this idea of privacy is compatible with a dialectical model of the self as shaped by, but also shaping, culture.63
As Allen humorously expresses this important facet of privacy: “Surely my privacy means more than that others should let me
alone to be the best darn African-American, Methodist, suburban wife and mother I can be. Privacy is also a matter of freedom
Given feminism’s interest in women’s freedom to
re-evaluate and escape oppressive connections,70 this facet of privacy should be
attractive.
to escape, reject, and modify such identities.”69
Of course, one vulnerability of sorting out “good” and “bad” kinds of privacy is that such a process might suggest that privacy is
so indeterminate and unruly a conception that it is neither stable nor useful." Liberals and liberal feminists might appear to be
saying to their critics, “Oh, but we don’t mean that kind of privacy. Trust us, we mean this kind of privacy.” To this, I have three
basic responses. First, as with any legal and cultural concept subject to evolving understandings (e.g., liberty and equality),
although we need to subject the various deployments of privacy in law and culture and its role in our social practices to critical
scrutiny, it does not follow that we should abandon the concept completely.” Second, to equate deployments of privacy that
have legitimated patriarchy and impaired women’s equal citizenship with liberalism ignores the extent to which fundamental
liberal principles, and certainly liberal feminist principles, should serve instead as an indictment of those deployments (as
discussed below concerning the problem of “private” violence)." Third, related concepts such as autonomy (or selfdetermination), self-development, and self-constitution may help get at the goods that privacy helps to secure ‘without
carrying all the negative associations.“
Feminist condemnation of privacy raises the “substantive moral and political question” of whether women have “no interest in
the values of privacy and intimacy,” or in keeping the state out of their lives in at least some circumstances."5 Allen’s
normative work on the value of privacy for women moves a considerable distance toward answering that question.
I am in general agreement with her two-fold conclusion: feminists have good reason to be critical of “what the
privacy of the private sphere has signified for women in the past and what the rhetoric and jurisprudence of privacy
rights can signal for the future?“ “At the same time, there is little doubt that women seeking greater control over
their lives already have begun to benefit from heightened social respect for appropriate forms of physical,
informational, proprietary, and decisional privacy?" Both privacy and private choice are important to the goal of
women being free, equal, safe, and intimate.
In grappling with the question of the best vocabulary for expressing some of these ideals, it might be useful to look to the
history of feminism for analogues to what Professor Peggy Davis calls “Motivating Stories -- that is, to see how
women’s
accounts of experience with bad forms of privacy that denied them autonomy and rendered them
vulnerable to violence and abuse (such as the law of coverture and the ideology of separate spheres”)
motivated legal
and social steps toward securing better forms of privacy for them. For instance, one plausible
interpretation of nineteenth-century feminist demands for “a right to self-ownership in marriage”80 and a “voluntary
marriage”81 is to view them as demands, in effect, for privacy and private choice-Le, for control of intimate access, freedom
from the sovereignty of another, and respect for bodily integrity. As Richards’s work suggests, abolitionist feminism would be
a rich resource for such “motivating stories.”82 Richards characterizes the legacy of abolitionist feminism’s indictment of
“moral slavery” for more contemporary rights-based feminism in terms of its call for basic, inalienable rights of conscience,
speech, intimate life, and work, and its indictment of injustice in women’s intimate lives.83 These basic rights, some of which
find embodiment in contemporary constitutional rights of privacy and private choice, are “culture-creating rights” (consistent
with the dialectical account of the self advanced above): they afford “appropriate space for the free exercise of our powers of
moral personality,” including “responsibly creating, forging, and sustaining” cultural and institutional forms.“ They also call for
the repudiation of conceptions of private life that have contributed to the oppression of women.“5 Similarly, some recent
feminist legal scholarship on the problem of intimate violence against women suggests that women’s experience of that
problem, and of their lack of meaningful privacy and autonomy, should undergird the re- construction of conceptions of
privacy and autonomy in a way that attends to the material and social preconditions for their enjoyment.88
Ultimately, feminist critiques of privacy highlight the need to sort out “dubious uses
of the notion of privacy” 7 and to reject the invocation of the values of privacy to
“mask exploitation and abuse. The reconstructive task is to build the normative case
for privacy and autonomy as valuable, and perhaps indispensable, elements in a
conception of free and equal citizenship for women as well as men. By appealing to
liberal toleration, abolitionism, and feminism, as well as to the creative resonances
among them, we may be able to reconstruct the roots of privacy and offer some
alternative images of it. In so doing, we can better express why the right to be let
alone may be the right most valued by “civilized” women as well as men.89
Private sphere empowers women and grants independence- Privacy and
disclosure are not mutually exclusive
Allen ’99 - Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Pennsylvania Law School (Anita , “Coercing Privacy", William and
Mary Law Review Vol. 40, Issue 3. Date: 03/01/1999- JSTOR)//KM
Feminists exploded the assumption that the proper role of women is to live under the authority
of men as daughters, wives, and mothers. The lives of American women once consisted chiefly of
domestic tasks, such as cooking, shopping, gardening, cleaning, and childrearing. "Conventions of
female chastity and modesty have shielded women in a mantle of privacy at a high cost to sexual choice and selfexpression."(82) Seclusion and subordination meant
that women generally were unable to utilize
their full capacities to participate in society. Maternal and social roles kept women--who might otherwise have
distinguished themselves in the public sphere as businesswomen, scholars, government leaders, and artists--in the private
sphere.(83) To increase women's participation in society, feminist activists have advocated for the right of women to hold
property, to vote, and to work outside the home in jobs of varied description for which they would be compensated on an
equal basis with men.(84)
Women have under-participated in societal affairs. Although the under-participation critique is
sweeping and true, the critique does not suggest that women should not seek privacy, or
eschew opportunities for personal privacy and private choice. Women today, especially educated and
middle-class women, have lifestyle options that they can exercise with privacy-related interests in
mind. Some of their options (e.g., celibacy, childlessness) have a cost. Encouraging women to recognize their
options, and to exercise their options in ways that acknowledge that women's privacy and
private choice are worth something, would be an appropriate feminist emphasis. Educating oneself,
delaying marriage, controlling the timing of childbearing, working part-time--all of these are techniques women
can use, and are using, to create lives in which they can enjoy forms and degrees of privacy
unknown to American women fifty years ago. A felicitous balance between privacy and disclosure can come about if
lessons about exploiting privacy and lessons about exploiting the new openness in public life are offered in tandem .
Some
feminists seem to assume that privacy and disclosure are differing models of how one might
live.(85) Privacy and disclosure are better understood, however, as important and necessary
dimensions of a range of good lives one can elect to live.
Reform Solves
Perm – do both – reform solves better than abdication of privacy
McClain 99 – Paul Siskind research scholar and professor of law at Boston
University, (Linda, “Reconstructive Tasks for a Liberal Feminist Conception of
Privacy,” 40.3, (1999), p.771-774, William and Mary Law Review Journal) //DS
An adequate liberal account of privacy requires a persuasive articulation, rather
than abdication, of a public/private distinction. To use Allen’s formulation, this is the
important task of rescuing the public and the private,90 which requires a liberal
framework within which “public and private are contingent, transformable
conceptions of how power ought best to be allocated among individuals, social
groups, and government.mu Perhaps the most forceful and pervasive feminist
criticism of privacy- and of the public/private distinction-stems from its role in
allowing unjust and hierarchical distributions of power between men and women
that have left women subject to the “private sovereignty” of men.92 For example, Professor
Reva Siegel’s historical analysis of the evolving legal treatment of violence against women in the home powerfully
demonstrates how, even after the law’s formal repudiation of the idea of coverture and a husband’s right to administer
“chastisement” to his wife, and even after the evolution from a model of authoritarian marriage to companionate marriage ,
courts continued to use the concept of “affective” or marital privacy to shield the
home from public exposure, leaving women without a remedy against intimate
violence.”3 An adequate account of governmental noninterference with private
choice and private life must condemn this invocation of privacy to immunize private
violence.
Perm solves – incremental change to refine the public/private dichotomy
necessary to solve gender equality
Lever 5 – Assoc Prof of normative political theory at the University of Geneva, her
research focuses on the nature and justification of privacy, the ethics of voting,
democracy and judicial review and the justification of intellectual property. (Annabelle,
“Feminism, Democracy and the Right to Privacy” http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie//vol9/Feminism.html)//CC
there is "a call for retaining but recasting the public and
private boundaries as part of an effort to preserve each yet reach towards an ideal of social
reconstruction." By taking part of Woolf's argument and looking outside the dominant society, not within,
can justice and equality and liberty for all men and women begin to be achieved. In order to
To begin to achieve this goal of gendered equality,
reconstruct the public/private in a gendered equality, first a deconstruction the market/family and state/family aspects of the
public/private must take place. This
does not mean that there is a need to destroy the line between the
public and private totally, but the need to redefine this line in a background of equality . The
reconstruction of the public/private divide along the lines of gendered equality is an undeniably
prodigious ambition, but having a final aspiration and ideal will aid in directing the change that is
needed. This change must not be forced in the form of legislation, though legislation does help in shaping
social attitudes, but must be completely embodied by individuals to facilitate in the social change
needed to achieve gendered equality. Slowly, through small refinements of the public and private, this
gendered equality will hopefully become an effective reality.
Perm do both – embracing action that uses privacy positively is necessary to
reform liberalism
McClain 99 – Paul Siskind research scholar and professor of law at Boston
University, (Linda, “Reconstructive Tasks for a Liberal Feminist Conception of Privacy,” 40.3, (1999), p.771-774, William
and Mary Law Review Journal) //DS
Liberal feminists’ internal critiques of liberalism have an important ongoing role to
play in reconstructing liberal conceptions of the public/private distinction and
insisting upon application of liberal principles in ways that are consistent with
feminist commitment to ending subordination on the basis of sex. For example, the home and
“domestic” relations are, indeed, proper subjects of legal regulation and implicate institutions of civil society in which
government has considerable interest.100 Governmental responsibility to protect women against violence in their homes
should follow readily from a liberal state’s core commitment to protect its citizens against private aggression.1m Accordingly,
liberal feminists correctly indict the ways in
which earlier liberal political theory about the marriage contract and family
governance contributed to the failure to keep this “most fundamental promise of the
social contract?”2 Liberals and liberal feminists vehemently oppose unjust status
hierarchies, such as those based on sex and race, which undermine selfdevelopment, the exercise of moral powers, and free and equal citizenship.“
All of this probably sounds familiar, perhaps even too familiar. Reconstructing privacy requires moving
beyond restating such rebuttals to feminist critiques of privacy. If they have not
already done so, liberals should readily grant that an adequate conception of privacy
in its various dimensions must clearly reject privacy’s legacy of confinement and
subordination, as well as the immunity of private aggression from the law’s reach.
The reconstructive task for an adequate liberal-and liberal feminist-model of
privacy requires a normative argument as to why society should honor some form
of public/private distinction and some limiting principles that admit an appropriate
role for governmental regulation of “private” life, “private” places, and “private”
relationships.
in the case of violence against women. within the family,
Reform key – decisional privacy necessary to female autonomy
Allen 88 – professor of Law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania’s law
school, (Anita, “Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society,” 1988, p.70-72,
Rowman and Littlefield) //DS
The preceding descriptive discussion exposed the dimensions of half of the twofold privacy problem faced by American
The problem of overcoming the tradition of confinement to the private sphere
of home, marriage, and caretaking roles as a substitute for and barrier to genuine
personal privacy. Liberal feminism represents one response to the problem. By
liberal feminism I mean a kind of liberalism that, first, recognizes that gender is not
a morally legitimate ground for denying women the legal, economic;, and social
rights ascribed to men; and that, second, presses for legal and social reform
calculated to enhance the status of women as self-determining individuals and
valued participants in the socioeconomic realm.
Liberalism and liberal feminism place a high value on personal privacy and embrace
the private sphere as occasions for privacy. Liberal feminism rejects forms of home
life, sex role stereotypes, and sexual ties that foreclose privacy options for women.
Although mindful of the ways in which traditional marriage, family life, and sex roles
women.
have resulted in inadequate privacy for women, liberal feminism in principle does
not oppose marrying, mothering, and heterosexual relationships. Instead liberal
feminism demands that these not be deemed women’s only options; and that, in any
event, sex, marriage and child-rearing be, to take a phrase from Jean Bethke
Elshtain,“reconstructed” consistent with sexual justice, through legal, economic and
attitudinal changes. The liberal feminist looks with favor upon decisional privacy in
the context of contraception and abortion because she views it as a tool of female
autonomy and privacy. Catherine MacKinnon opposes the liberal feminist response to women's privacy problem.
She rejects the “ideology” of the private because she assumes that it can be understood only in historical terms as referring to
conditions of male hegemony and female inequality. conditions reinforced by the liberal democratic conceptions of political
morality.
It contradicts the liberal definition of the private to complain in public of inequality within it . . . The democratic ideal of the
private holds that, so long as the public does not interfere. autonomous individuals interact freely and equally. Conceptually.
the private is hermetic. It means that which is inaccessible to. unaccountable to. unconstructed by anything beyond itself . . . It
is personal. intimate. autonomous. particular. the original source and final outpost of the self. gender neutral. It is. In short,
defined by everything that feminism reveals women have never been allowed to be or have, and everything that women have
been
equated with.67
To reject the private sphere for the reasons MacKinnon gives is to toss out the baby
(privacy itself) with the bathwater (confinement and inequality). MacKinnon rightly
condemned women's unequal control of sex and powerlessness to make decisions about
matters most closely associated with their own bodies and self-development. She rightly judged that existing conditions of
But
these are not reasons to reject privacy, the private sphere, or the decisional privacy right of Roe v.
sexual inequality in the private sphere can undercut decisional privacy rights established by law on behalf of women.
Wade.
Decisional privacy rights have done more than supplement male authority over women. Many
women still “second-chair” men in sexual relationships, but Roe and access to birth control have helped to create new powers,
new norms, and new expectations of self- determination among women. Decisional
privacy must be
recognized as one of the important remedies for the problem of sexual inequality
and women’s lack of meaningful privacy. Economic equality, by which I mean equal employment
opportunity, equal pay, and greater recognition of the economic and social worth of the kinds of work women essential
remedies as well. It is as mistaken to dismiss decisional privacy because it is impaired by residual male domination, as it would
be to dismiss equal pay and comparable worth because their efficacy is impaired by residual male domination of private
relations.
Male hegemony is not a reason to reject decisional privacy, and it is not a reason to
reject the idea of privacy and the private sphere. Absent radical social
reorganization, to reject the private sphere is virtually to reject the notion of reliable
opportunities for seclusion, anonymity, and solitude. As I will argue in Chapter 4, one of the great
benefits of decisional privacy respecting birth control and abortion is that it enables women to enjoy important forms of
privacy at home. Decisional privacy is a tool women can use to create and control the privacy available to themselves and
those with whom they choose to share their private lives. So too are options about marriage, employment, and careers.
To the extent that it ceases to be an obligatory domain of self- renunciation and the
lack of privacy for women, the objection to the private sphere based on its being a
form of subjugation through confinement is severely blunted. ln women’s lives
today the home potentially serves the function it once was thought to serve for menthe role of a haven, a realm in which the pressures of the larger world are relaxed.
Not a haven for the exercise of domination over others, but a haven for solitude or
selected intercourse with others. Home will not be a haven, especially not for the
17.5 million working women with children and the 13.8 million with husbands,
without changes in attitudes about the importance of privacy for women and public
policies that reinforce those attitudes.
Liberal Legalism Good
Equality Turn
Liberal legalism reinforces autonomy, abolishing any gender hierarchy
Ward 95 - professor of law at the College of William and Mary, (Cynthia, “The Radical
Feminist Defense of Feminist Individualism,” 89.3, (1995), p. 878-879, Northwestern Law Review) //DS
Of course MacKinnon does not want to accept this view of domination. Like the notion of dominance as predominance, this
second view is perfectly consistent with liberal premises and solutions to sex inequality. Remember that the liberal feminist
argues for the removal of artificial barriers to women's advancement in the public sphere on the basis that such barriers
violate liberalism's core ideals of equal respect and concern. Once these barriers have been removed, the liberal assumes that
women will achieve power and prestige to the extent of their individual capabilities. That is, liberalism
treats
women as possessing individual "selves" that are equal to men's in the capacities for
autonomy and rationality, and liberal theory assumes that these selves will emerge
once equal legal rights have been extended to women. Of course, the achievement of this goal
would not mean that all attempts at domination would end. To the extent that human beings are willing to use power to coerce
each other and violate each other's autonomy, domination-including, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace-would
continue. But if liberals are right, once women enter the top ranks of power, such domination will not move in only one
direction-domination by men over women. Coercion will be spread more or less evenly between the sexes, with powerful
women using their status to obtain sex from male subordinates just as men have long used power over women for this
purpose. Hierarchy will continue, but gender-based hierarchy will dissolve. It would make sense in such a
world to outlaw certain forms of domination, such as sex harassment, just as we do physical assault, based not on its effect on
women solely but on its especially damaging impact on the autonomy and personhood of the victim, whether male or female.
Indeed, this motivation undoubtedly lies behind contemporary liberal feminists' support for laws against sex harassment-and
the law's refusal to confine that term to cases involving harassment by a man against a woman .
The key point is that
certain forms of coercion may be outlawed on the liberal premise that they violate
the autonomy of the individual victim, a premise that implicitly adopts the principle
that all persons are to be treated as having such autonomy and that preserving
autonomy is a good to which the law must be responsive. Thus, on this second definition of
domination, the gender hierarchy disappears via liberal legalism.
Privacy Good
Facism Turn
Alt causes facism – overpersonalization of politics causes a blind drive for
utopia that necessitates eliminating the dissenters
Kelly ’03 -- Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at UCONN.
(Kristin A., Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy, ed. By K. Kelly. P. 39-40)//FM
One of the strongest attacks on radical interpretations of the public/ private split has come from Jean Bethke Elshtain. In
Public Man, Private Woman, she argues
that if the remedies proposed by Firestone and other
radical feminists were to be actualized, the result would be fascism. Relying on H. P. Stern’s
study of Germany’s Third Reich, she declares that “fascism begins and ends with an
overpersonalization of politics.” Elshtain believes that the radical feminists’ rallying
cry, “The personal is political,”embodies exactly this type of “overpersonalization.”
By collapsing the distinction between public and private, radical feminists risk
creating a situation in which “one no longer speaks as an autonomous individual but
as woman-identified woman, fused with others, seeking union finally with the Great
Mother.“ Elshtain sees this utopian vision as akin to fascism for several reasons. First, radical feminists have
overstated the extent of women’s oppression and victimization and have ignored
the many historical examples where women have been empowered and active
participants in Western culture. Radical solutions become inevitable and reasonable
only when placed against a distorted and exaggerated assessment of a problem.
Were such “utopias” to be realized, all of the many men and women who do not feel
oppressed by the old system would need to be reeducated so as to see their true
victimizer and victim roles. Because Elshtain thinks that very few people really
believe the assertions of radical feminists, their desired outcome would necessarily
entail a highly coercive and brutal reeducation process. What makes radical feminist
solutions most dangerous for Elshtain is the threat that they pose to the existence of
the private family. According to her, elimination of the private family would entail
nothing less than the destruction of our ability to function as social beings. This
argument is connected to her belief that it is only in the private family unit that
children can experience the primary attachments to specific adults who are
essential to development of the skills needed to connect productively with other
individuals. Citing examples of neglected children in the communes of the 19603 and a “wild” boy who grew up alone in
France and was subsequently incapable of living in society, Elshtain makes the strong case that the family must be
understood as a “categorical imperative of human existence.” Further, although she concurs with
many of the feminist positions as to why the current configurations of the public/private split hurt women, she maintains that
feminists must subordinate their concerns as long as there is any danger that the
proposed solutions will interfere with children’s need for long-term,
intergenerational ties with specific adults. The feminist political thinker must
similarly ask at what price she would gain the world for herself or other women,
utterly rejecting those victories that come at the cost of the bodies and spirits of
human infants. Unless this reflexivity is ongoing and central, feminism is in peril of
losing its soul. The feminist concerned with a reconstructive ideal of the private
sphere must begin by affirming the essential needs of children for basic, long-term
ties with specific others. Elshtain is certain that the best place for children is in a familial context protected from
the pressures of the public world. In keeping with this view, she is adamant that feminists
maintaining a clear split between private and public.
should support
Ext. Facism Turn
Radical feminist “freedom” leads to facism – biological imperative used to
eliminate dissenters
Elshtain ’93 – American ethicist, the laura spelman Rockefeller professor of social
and political ethics in the university of Chicago(Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man,
Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, p.219-221)
Firestone’s future–and with this I shall lead into the disturbing question of an antidemocratic impulse in radical
feminist politics–offers us the cybernetrician as the modern savior. Her scenario for salvation
runs roughly like this: (1) free women from biological “tyranny”; (2) this freeing will
undermine all of society and culture which is erected upon biological “tyranny” and the state, religion, and
law erected upon the family will erode and collapse. The woman who internalizes
Firestone’s ideology can work to achieve Firestone’s future by seizing control of
reproduction and owning her own body. A hard-edged, calculated intrusion of market language into all aspects
of life–once the private is deprivatized–is characteristic of Firestone’s evocation of the future.
Ultimately, Firestone continues, test-tube babies will replace biological reproduction as the chief
means of reproduction, pregnancy having been declared “barbaric” with the “fat lady” being peered at by
strangers, laughed at by insensitive children, and deserted by feckless husbands. Full victory is achieved when
every aspect of human life rests in the beneficent hands of a “new elite of engineers,
cybernetricians.” This cybernetic elite will wield its totalistic control for good and benevolent
ends. It is only fair to note that Adrienne Rich, in her exploration of motherhood, repudiates calls
for technological control of reproduction and state takeover of child care. The problem with Rich’s
account, one that is very moving in places, is her insistence that “under patriarchy” the family and mothering
will remain terrible and debased. Since under patriarchy” is where we all are, in her view, it is hard to see
any way out save the one she favors: separate female communities. What happens to politics in
Firestone’s new world? Like the family it has disappeared, though of course there was no real politics in her
prefuturistic society either, just control, oppression, and tyranny, natural-cum-political. Within
her cybernetized utopia, a series of isolated human calculators of marginal utility run rampant.
Abstract Man, Woman, and Child engage in a hard-edged pursuit of the best deal. The child, for example, with no need to be
“hung up” by authoritarian parents, may bargain for the latest deal in contracted households. Firestone calls
this total
breakdown of community “freedom,” yet insists that this total freedom is also total
community. Her feminist future emerges as a hybrid admixture of the “hard” and the “soft.”
This becomes clear in her discussion of male and female modes, the “hard” and the “soft” on a grand
scale. Firestone discusses these abstractions as if they had real agency in the world. At one point a
“cultural revolution” occurs, a fusion of masculine and feminine modes resulting in an explosive
“sum of their integration,” characterized thus: “A matter-antimatter explosion, ending with a poof!
Culture itself.” This yearning for the apocalypse, for some totalistic solution of all human woes, for a
thoroughgoing fusion of all principles, represents a utopian fantasy with regressive implications: at least that is the
way it plays politically.
Feminist approaches to language lead to fascism
Elshtain ’93 – American ethicist, the laura spelman Rockefeller professor of social
and political ethics in the university of Chicago(Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man,
Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, p.223-224)
There are several radical feminist approaches to language: one is a tough, hard language filled
with talk of power, exploitation, manipulation, and violence. The other is an overblown ontological language
which represents the flip side of Hobbesian nominalism. The best example of this genre is Mary Daly’s
metaphysical or “metaethical” language of demonology. It may be well to recall that Hobbes was
reacting against metaphysical language within which individuals were suffocated by, or suffused with, ontic categories.
His own solution – to reduce humans to matter in motion – was extreme. Daly returns to a mode of
discourse which is the verbal equivalent of military overkill. She sees herself as creating a new language, the old
being totally male-dominated, thus breaking and alienating every female ‘I’ who must speak and
write it. The other possibility is to move to a realm beyond language, to a language that does not differentiate or classify objects of reference
but is the medium of fusion with some greater whole. Again, conceptual similarities to fascism, which also insisted
that the old language and reason was thoroughly false, debased, and unacceptable, arise. Anti-democratic politics
utterly rejects human discourse. Language must no longer serve, as it must for otherwise in would not be language, as a “divisive instrument,” as
an expression of diversity and variability. Perhaps the apogee of this mistrust of language is Daly’s insistence that Lesbians must imitate/learn
from the language of “dumb” animals, “whose nonverbal communication seems to be superior to androcratic speech.” Daly cites several
conversations she has had with animals and translates a few of those conversations; needless to say, all the animals shared her perspective and
none contested her position.
Victimization Turn
Radical feminist language constructs women as the weak Other, indoctrinating
women as victims
Elshtain ’93 – American ethicist, the laura spelman Rockefeller professor of social
and political ethics in the university of Chicago(Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man,
Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, p.224-225)
One final turn of this troubling issue and that is the language of radical feminist description – the way
the social world is characterized and the way woman is portrayed as debased, victimized, deformed, and mutilated, as a cunt,
a hag, and a piece of ass. Description always takes place from a point of view and hence is evaluative.
We describe situations on the basis of those aspects of the situation we deem relevant or
important. In this way, we always evaluate under a certain description. Description is to a purpose and constitutes
an evaluation that either opens events up for critical scrutiny from a moral point of view or forecloses our capacity to examine them in
this way. A serious problem of choice emerges for the thinker who wishes to describe a situation in a way that
simultaneously condemns it. If the descriptive language is too muted – saying, for example, that workers on an assembly
line are not “fulfilled” – the moral and political point may be lost. Overstating the descriptive case,
saying that such workers are “hideously enslaved, reduced to robots” may backfire as the overinflated description
raises in the reader’s mind the suspicion that the describer “protests too much,” that things can’t
possibly be all that bad. Most troubling of all , some feminists who set out to describe in order to condemn
may, in their very description, embrace the terms of their own degradation. This is a complicated
point and I shall try to unfold it. Powerlessness begets a distortion to self-understanding. The save may come to see himself
as the master sees him, he may, for example, embrace his own slavishness. Similarly, “the woman, by willfully
defining herself as ‘the exploited,’ as ‘victim’; by seeing herself as she was reflected in the
male’s perception of her,” may seek thereby to attain some power over men, some measure of control.
This process varies from one social epoch to the next as the terms of male perceptions of women change. What
is distressing is the repeated evocation in feminist discourse of images of female helplessness
and victimization. The presumption is that the victim speaks in a pure voice: I suffer therefore I have
moral purity. But the belief in such purity is itself one of the effects of powerlessness.
Equality Turn
Privacy reinforces women’s autonomy – causes empowerment, not
oppression
Allen ’99 - Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Pennsylvania Law School (Anita , “Coercing Privacy", William and
Mary Law Review Vol. 40, Issue 3. Date: 03/01/1999- JSTOR)//KM
Feminists exploded the assumption that the proper role of women is to live under
the authority of men as daughters, wives, and mothers. The lives of American women
once consisted chiefly of domestic tasks, such as cooking, shopping, gardening,
cleaning, and childrearing. "Conventions of female chastity and modesty have shielded women in a mantle of
privacy at a high cost to sexual choice and self-expression."(82) Seclusion and subordination meant that
women generally were unable to utilize their full capacities to participate in society.
Maternal and social roles kept women--who might otherwise have distinguished themselves
in the public sphere as businesswomen, scholars, government leaders, and artists--in
the private sphere.(83) To increase women's participation in society, feminist activists have advocated for the right
of women to hold property, to vote, and to work outside the home in jobs of varied description for which they would be
compensated on an equal basis with men.(84)
Women have under-participated in societal affairs. Although the under-participation
critique is sweeping and true, the critique does not suggest that women should not
seek privacy, or eschew opportunities for personal privacy and private choice.
Women today, especially educated and middle-class women, have lifestyle options that they can
exercise with privacy-related interests in mind. Some of their options (e.g., celibacy, childlessness) have a
cost. Encouraging women to recognize their options, and to exercise their options in
ways that acknowledge that women's privacy and private choice are worth
something, would be an appropriate feminist emphasis. Educating oneself, delaying marriage,
controlling the timing of childbearing, working part-time--all of these are techniques women can use,
and are using, to create lives in which they can enjoy forms and degrees of privacy
unknown to American women fifty years ago. A felicitous balance between privacy and disclosure can come
about if lessons about exploiting privacy and lessons about exploiting the new openness in public life are offered in tandem.
Some feminists seem to assume that privacy and disclosure are differing models of
how one might live.(85) Privacy and disclosure are better understood, however, as
important and necessary dimensions of a range of good lives one can elect to live.
Autonomy critical to human dignity – leads to dehumanization
McFarland 12 - Michael McFarland, S.J., a computer scientist with extensive liberal arts
teaching experience and a special interest in the intersection of technology and ethics,
served as the 31st president of the College of the Holy Cross.
(“Why We Care About Privacy” http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/technology/internet/privacy/why-care-aboutprivacy.html)//CC
Autonomy is part of the broader issue of human dignity, that is, the obligation to treat
people not merely as means, to be bought and sold and used, but as valuable and
worthy of respect in themselves. As the foregoing has made clear, personal information is an
extension of the person. To have access to that information is to have access to the
person in a particularly intimate way. When some personal information is taken and
sold or distributed, especially against the person's will, whether it is a diary or personal letters, a record of
buying habits, grades in school, a list of friends and associates or a psychological history, it is as if some part of the
person has been alienated and turned into a commodity. In that way the person is
treated merely as a thing, a means to be used for some other end.
Ext. Equality Turn
Privacy leads to gender equality
Lever 05 - Associate Professor of Normative Political Theory in the Department of
Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland. (Annabelle; “Feminism, Democracy, and the Right to Privacy”;
PhilPapers)//KM
Feminist
ambivalence about privacy, then, is not simply a product of neurosis, a failure of critical
thinking, or of disingenuousness about the implications of their ideas. Rather it testifies to the
ways that this work has exposed the limitations of even the best critical thinking on democracy,
and of those political movements and social ideals from which feminists, like other men and
women, have drawn their insights, inspiration and energy. Still, as we have seen, democratic government is
justified not simply because the sharing of political power, or the alternation of ruling and being ruled are all valuable, and
reasons to prefer democratic government to the alternatives. In addition, and no less significantly, one might add that where
this is the case, democracy is justified by all the other things that it makes possible: the pursuit of knowledge, beauty, love,
happiness, freedom from want or from illness – and that it makes possible not just for the privileged or fortunate few, but for
the many. So,
if feminist criticisms of the public/private distinction are right, there should be
nothing sexist or undemocratic in thinking that while organised collective effort can enable us to
achieve ends and values that would otherwise be impossible so, too, it can prevent individuals
from discovering what their interests are, and from pursuing these under their own steam, or in
association with people who they like and trust. It follows, therefore, that individuals have
legitimate interests in personal as well as political forms of freedom and equality. As each is as
important as the other, and neither is wholly reducible to the other, a democracy must protect both – even though there is no
sharp or unchanging difference between them. Thus, whichever side of the public/private distinction we look at, individuals
have legitimate interests that are both personal and political, and that constrain how a democracy can rightly treat its
members, as the personal and political interests of individuals serve to justify state action, where it is justified, and to
condemn it, where it is illegitimate. In
short, whether we look at principles of democratic government, or
at the demands of sexual equality, a concern for people’s personal, as well as political, freedom
and equality explains when government action is justified, and the differences between legitimate and
illegitimate forms of government. To show that this is the case, and to illuminate the reasons why this is so, I suggest that we
distinguish between two ways that we might justify privacy rights on democratic principles. The
one, I will call ‘the political justification of privacy rights’, the other, I will call ‘the personal
justification’. Whereas the former justifies privacy rights based on individuals’ interests in democratic forms of political
choice and participation, the latter justifies them on the grounds that they help to protect the personal freedom and equality of
individuals. Fully worked out, I believe, the two justifications of privacy rights will be very similar, because people’s claims to
personal life, in a democracy, must take account of other people’s interests in political participation and judgement – and viceversa. However, in the interests of clarity and brevity, I cannot fully lay out each of these justifications of privacy here. Instead,
I will focus on those aspects of them that most clearly reflect feminist criticisms of the public/private distinction, and their
implications for liberal and republican ideas about politics. Thus, I will argue that
legal rights to privacy are
justified even where individuals have democratic political rights — such as rights to vote, to
form political parties, unions and the like — because, suitably defined, privacy rights represent a
society’s commitment to the freedom and equality of its members, and are useful, sometimes,
necessary devices to ensure that legal rights are, indeed, democratic. To avoid unnecessary complexities,
I will assume that legal rights can be justified on democratic principles,6 and will try to stick to pretty intuitive and generally
accepted assumptions about what, if anything, a privacy right looks like, and what must be granted about politics in a
democracy. Thus,
I will think of privacy rights as primarily, but not exclusively, rights of solitude,
intimacy and confidentiality – as whatever the controversy over these rights, privacy rights are
generally thought to include these three. Similarly, I will assume that democratic politics involves making and
enforcing decisions that will affect everyone, aggregating and representing the different interests of individuals, and pursuing
common ends through cooperation and competition. For there is, I suspect, no credible conception of democracy that excludes
these elements, although different conceptions of democracy may emphasise some of these more than others. The Political
Justification The political justification of privacy rights has two aspects: one, a claim that such rights are useful devices for
promoting political participation and for testing that rights of political choice, association and expression adequately protect
the legitimate interests of individuals. The other, is that protection
for privacy itself is worthwhile, given a
commitment to a politics that is free, and a reflection of the equality of individuals. Each obviously
depends on the assumption that privacy rights can serve a useful purpose in a democracy, by supplementing the other rights
of individuals. However, the emphasis in each case is slightly different, for the former stresses the political uses of privacy
rights, whereas the latter locates their justification more directly in the political ideals of democracy itself. The secret ballot,
for instance, reflects the ways in which protection for the confidentiality of individuals can promote their political freedom and
equality. However democratic our political rights look on their face, they will obviously fail to protect the legitimate interests
of individuals if violence and intimidation can prevent their exercise, or determine the uses to which these rights are put. Thus,
the standard justification for the secret ballot is that it helps to ensure that voting is voluntary, by ensuring that no-one can
force anybody to vote, or to vote in one way rather than another. But the justification for the secret ballot is not purely
instrumental, given democratic principles - despite the views of those, like John Stuart Mill, who believe that everyone should,
in principle, know how everyone else has voted (Mill, 1993, ch. 10 and especially 323-9). Mill’s idea, clearly, is that people
must be accountable to each other for the way that they have voted, because voting can fundamentally affect the wellbeing of
others.
Toto Turn
Privacy necessary to prevent tyranny – aff necessary to break down surveillance
Spencer 14 – Brian John Spencer is a writer and legal blogger. (“Glenn GreenwaldPrivacy is Necessary for Creativity”
http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/03/glenn-greenwald-privacy-isnecessary.html, March 31, 2014)//CC
In an article in Salon, "Surveillance breeds conformity" Natasha Lennard spoke with Glenn Greenwald. He explained why privacy
the prerequisite to being a fully formed human being and the prerequisite to creativity .
He explained this with two points. Firstly, Glenn Greenwald said that the first value of privacy is the personal: "I
think the primary value of privacy is personal as opposed to legalistic or constitutional
or political, by which I mean it’s essential to what it means to be human that we have
a private life. We interact with other human beings as social animals, and live part of our lives in the public eye — that’s
crucial — that’s why if you put someone in solitary confinement for 23 and a half hours a day like we do in U.S. prisons, it’s a form of
torture. And it makes people go insane, because we need, as part of our human functioning, to be seen by other human beings and
to be perceived by them and understood through the eyes of other people. Secondly, it's about being free to explore and express
oneself creatively: "Equally
important to who we are is a realm where we can be free of those
judgments, of people watching us. That’s why people have always sought out realms
where they can conduct themselves with anonymity and privacy. Where there aren’t
other human eyes forming judgments and posing decrees about what they should and
shouldn’t do. The reason it is so crucial is that it is only in that state that we are free to do the things that other human beings
would condemn us for doing. We can be free of shame and guilt and embarrassment; it’s where
creativity resides, it is where dissent to an orthodoxy can thrive. A human being who
lives in a world where he thinks he is always being watched is a human being who
makes choices not as a free individual but as someone who is trying to conform to what
is expected and demanded of them. And you lose a huge part of your individual freedom
when you lose your private realm. Politically that is why tyranny loves surveillance, because it
breeds conformity. It means people will only do that which they want other people to
know they’re doing — in other words, nothing that is deviant or dissenting or disruptive. It breeds orthodoxy. Glenn has
spoken elsewhere on this issue. In the video above and here, Glenn Greenwald said (at 36 minutes): "It is in the private realm,
exclusively, where things like dissent and creativity and challenges to orthodoxy reside. It's only when you know that you can
explore without external judgement, where you can experiment without eyes being cast upon you, is the opportunity for creating
new paths possible. And there are all kinds of fascinating studies that prove this to be the case. There are a number of psychological
studies where people have sat down at their dinner table with family members or friends and they're talking for a very long time and
they're taking in an informal way and suddenly one of them pulls out a tape recorder and puts it on the table and says: I'm going to
tape record our conversation just for my own interest. I promise I'm not going to tell anybody... Invariably what happens is the
people who are now being recorded radically change their behavior. They speak in much more stilted sentences. They try to talk
about much more high ended minded topics. They're much more stiff in their expression of things because they now feel they're
being monitored." And here with Advocate.com: "The
private realm is where creativity, dissent, and
innovation exclusively reside." And also: "If you eliminate that private realm, you breed
conformity. When all your behavior is public, then you’re going to do the things that the
society insists you do and nothing else, and you lose so much of who you are as a
human being."
Ext. Toto Turn
Surveillance is a method of social control— privacy is necessary to maintain
democracy
McFarland 12 - Michael McFarland, S.J., a computer scientist with extensive liberal arts
teaching experience and a special interest in the intersection of technology and ethics,
served as the 31st president of the College of the Holy Cross.
(“Why We Care About Privacy”
http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/technology/internet/privacy/whycare-about-privacy.html)//CC
Privacy is even more necessary as a safeguard of freedom in the relationships between
individuals and groups. As Alan Westin has pointed out, surveillance and publicity are powerful
instruments of social control.8 If individuals know that their actions and dispositions are
constantly being observed, commented on and criticized, they find it much harder to do
anything that deviates from accepted social behavior. There does not even have to be an explicit threat
of retaliation. "Visibility itself provides a powerful method of enforcing norms." 9 Most people are afraid to stand apart, to be
different, if it means being subject to piercing scrutiny. The
"deliberate penetration of the individual's
protective shell, his psychological armor, would leave him naked to ridicule and shame
and would put him under the control of those who know his secrets." 10Under these circumstances
they find it better simply to conform. This is the situation characterized in George Orwell's 1984 where the pervasive surveillance of
"Big Brother" was enough to keep most citizens under rigid control. 11 Therefore privacy,
as protection from
excessive scrutiny, is necessary if individuals are to be free to be themselves. Everyone
needs some room to break social norms, to engage in small "permissible deviations"
that help define a person's individuality. People need to be able to think outrageous thoughts, make scandalous
statements and pick their noses once in a while. They need to be able to behave in ways that are not dictated to them by the
surrounding society. If every appearance, action, word and thought of theirs is captured and posted on a social network visible to
the rest of the world, they lose that freedom to be themselves. As Brian Stelter wrote in the New York Times on the loss of
anonymity in today's online world, "The collective intelligence of the Internet's two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so
many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and
every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This
intelligence makes the
public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into
public view." 12 This ability to develop one's unique individuality is especially important
in a democracy, which values and depends on creativity, non-conformism and the free
interchange of diverse ideas. That is where a democracy gets its vitality. Thus, as Westin has observed,
"Just as a social balance favoring disclosure and surveillance over privacy is a functional
necessity for totalitarian systems , so a balance that ensures strong citadels of individual
and group privacy and limits both disclosure and surveillance is a prerequisite for liberal
democratic societies. The democratic society relies on publicity as a control over government, and on privacy as a shield for
group and individual life." 13 When Brandeis and Warren wrote their seminal article on privacy over one hundred years ago, their
primary concern was with the social pressure caused by excessive exposure to public scrutiny of the private affairs of individuals. The
problem for them was the popular press, which represented the "monolithic, impersonal and value-free forces of modern society,"
14
undermining the traditional values of rural society, which had been nurtured and protected by local institutions such as family,
church and other associations. The exposure of the affairs of the well-bred to the curiosity of the masses, Brandeis and Warren
feared, had a leveling effect which undermined what was noble and virtuous in society, replacing it with the base and the trivial.
Privacy means the right to decide—it is key to individual liberty
Laas-Mikko and Sutrop 12 – Katrin Laas-Mikko and Margit Sutrop, Certification Centre
Ldt., Tallinn, and University of Tartu in Estonia. (“How Do Violations of Privacy and
Moral Autonomy Threaten the Basis of Our Democracy?”
http://www.kirj.ee/public/trames_pdf/2012/issue_4/trames-2012-4-369-381.pdf)//CC
Privacy can be described as limited to the ‘sphere’ surrounding the person, within which
that person has the right to control access to himself or herself . Consequently, privacy is applicable
only within certain boundaries (not necessarily or only spatial) that surround that person (Persson and Hansson 2003:61). We
support a normative concept of privacy, where privacy means the person’s right to
decide who and to what extent other persons can access and use information
concerning him or her, have access to his or her physical body; access and use
physical/intimate space surrounding the person. Privacy can be an intrinsic value , while also
fulfilling many important goals. In her article “Privacy and the Limits of Law” (1980) Ruth Gavison has shown that when speaking of
the functional/instrumental meaning of privacy, we begin with the assumption that privacy is concerned with developing or
preserving something that is desired. Gavison distinguishes between functions that privacy has with respect to the individual and
those that concern society as a whole. In order to determine what functions privacy has with respect to the individual, we must
consider what we deem important about being a person. Many Western theorists (Gavison 1980, Kupfer 1987, Häyry and Takala
2001, Rössler 2005) have indicated that the
primary task of privacy with respect to the individual is to
protect his or her autonomy. For example, Joseph Kupfer (1987:81–82) claims that privacy is a necessary
(though not the only) condition for the development of an autonomous ‘I’ or self. One of the most
thorough treatments of privacy has been presented by Beate Rössler in her book, “The Value of Privacy” (2005), which centers on
the question of why we value privacy. Rössler endeavors to show that “privacy
in liberal societies is valued and
needed for the sake of individual liberty and autonomy, that is, for the sake of both
freedom for each individual to fulfill himself, and thus ultimately for the sake of a life that is
rewarding” (2005:44). She describes privacy as the ability to control ‘access’ in the physical
or metaphorical sense to one’s personhood, enabling autonomy practices; to decide over matters that concern
one (including free behavior and action, that is, decisional privacy), to control what other people can know
about oneself (informational privacy), and to protect one’s own space for self-evaluation and intimate
relationships (local privacy). In the context of development and application of new technologies, our main concern is with
informational privacy, a
person’s control over the access and use of information about himself
or herself.3 The answer to the question, what kind of society we desire depends on what we believe to be important to live a
good life. Society should create opportunities for the flourishing of the individual. Preconditions for the selfrealization of the autonomous individual are a liberal democracy and a pluralistic
society, where everyone can live according to his or her chosen model of the good life. The reverse is also true: a
democratic society presupposes an autonomous individual 3 who can determine what
constitutes the good for himself or herself and to choose the means of achieving this .
Maintaining privacy is critical to individual sovereignty—critical to reflection
and experimentation
Pomeroy 5 –Dr. Pomeroy received bachelors and medical degrees from the University
of Michigan; she is currently professor emerita at UC Davis. Dr. Pomeroy was chief of
infectious diseases and associate dean for research and informatics at the University of
Kentucky. (“Redefining Public and Private in the Framework of a Gendered Equality”
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/courses/knowbody/f04/web3/cpomeroy.html)//CC
Associated with the private sphere is intimacy; with the public sphere is detachment and
coldness. The private sphere is a place that a person can escape from the impersonal public sphere. Privacy "allows us to do
things we would not do in public, to experiment, to engage in self-reflection; it protects us from majoritarian pressures; it allows us
to control who we will have access to ourselves and to information about ourselves, and to make decisions that critically affect our
lives."
It is not intended to secure separation from social pressure, but to assist social
involvements and intimacy. As the line between private and public dissolves, the private haven
that procures love, trust and compassion does so as well. It must be addressed that the private does not
necessarily provide this haven; for some the private harbors fear of the injustices that can be committed under the radar of the
system.
However, if the private is fully abolished, the autonomy of individuals will be lost. Privacy
is a way of affirming the "centrality of uncoerced individual decision-making in important areas
of human activity." If the private space is completely lost in this blurring between public and
private, the sacredness of our sovereignty as individuals will be lost along with it.
Movement Turn
Deconstructing public/private binary destroys women’s movements
Pomeroy 5 - Dr. Pomeroy received bachelors degrees from the University of
Michigan; she is currently professor emerita at UC Davis. Dr. Pomeroy was associate
dean for research and informatics at the University of Kentucky. (“Redefining Public and
Private in the Framework of a Gendered Equality”
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/courses/knowbody/f04/web3/cpomeroy.html)/
/CC
"Public
and private are imbedded within a dense web of associational meanings and intimations and linked to
other basic notions: nature and culture, male and female... The content, meaning, and range of
public and private vary with the exigencies of each society's existence and turn on whether the
virtues of political life or the values of private life are rich and vital or have been drained, singly or
together, of their normative significance." The mantra of second wave feminism, "the personal is political,"
signifies the first attempt to break down the gendered division between the private sphere
attributed to women and the public sphere of men. There is no clear origin of this public/private division; it could
have been, as Germaine Greer humorously suggests, "while the male-hunter-gatherer strolled along burdened with no more that his
spear and a throwing stick, his female mate trudged along after him carrying their infant, their shelter, their food supplies and her
digging stick." It appears that, from the moment of human interaction and language, and its implicit category making of social
divisions, women have always been associated with the private, and men with the public. From
the beginning of first
wave feminism and the fight for women's suffrage, women have been using politics to enter the public
realm of men, thus challenging the stark division between public man and private woman. A
goal of the feminist movement has been to create equality between the sexes, both in the
public and private spheres of life. In doing so, the gendered spaces of men and women have become
blurred and, because of the linkage between public/private and man/woman, respectively, the
division between private and public has also become unclear. The deconstruction of the
public/private binary has several implications. It has politicized women's voices in a way that has
disrupted the unity of women. Second, the concerns of private life are now exposed to the
public, allowing for public and political influence on the private life, specifically in the form of legislation. Third, the
deconstruction of the public/private threatens the individuality of experiences of women as
women. Finally, it jeopardizes the sanctity of the private space. By looking at different models for gender
equality within the private and public spaces we can begin to find a way in these spaces can be reconstructed to achieve a gendered
equality while still preserving the public/private divide and the integrity and individuality of men and women.
K Outdated
Privacy no longer causes state non-interference -- K lit outdated
Solove 02 - Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington
University Law School
(Daniel, " Gender and Privacy in CyberSpace " , Conceptualizing California Law Review Vol. 90, No.
4 (Jul., 2002), pp. 1087-1155 –JSTOR)//KM
My point is that in earlier times, certain attitudes and¶ practices regarding the nature of the
family were more prevalent and¶ widely accepted than they are today.¶ Beginning in the nineteenth
century, the family increasingly became¶ more conducive to the private life of the individual,
gradually shifting¶ from an economic institution to a place of intimacy and self-fulfillment.26.
Work and home began to be physically separated, creating a public professional¶ world of business and a
more private intimate world of the family.¶ The growth of individualism-the "concept of the self as
unique, and free¶ to pursue his or her own goals; and a related decline in the idea that the¶
overriding obligation was to the kin, the society, or the state"263-led to a¶ rebellion against
arranged marriages, transforming marriage into an institution¶ of personal choice rather than of
economic gain.264 Gradually, the family¶ began to develop into a "private entity focused into itself."265¶ For women,
the family was for a long time not associated with self-development.¶ According to Anita Allen,
throughout much of history,¶ "[m]arriage has been described as a woman's greatest obstacle
to¶ privacy."266 As Reva Siegel explains, a "wife was obliged to obey and¶ serve her husband,
and the husband was subject to a reciprocal duty to¶ support his wife and represent her within
the legal system."267 Husbands¶ could also physically punish their wives (known as "chastisement") so long¶ as no
permanent injury was inflicted.268 Chastisement was justified by¶ courts not wanting to interfere with marital privacy.269 As
one court explained,¶ although wife beating would typically be classified as an assault,¶ doing
so would "throw open the bedroom to the gaze of the public; and¶ spread discord and misery,
contention and strife, where peace and concord¶ ought to reign."270 Thus, ironically, "privacy" of the
family consisted of an¶ association of noninterference of the state in domestic affairs which
served,¶ as Siegel explains, "to enforce and preserve authority relations between¶ man and
wife."271 This association has led to a number of feminist scholars¶ attacking privacy in the domestic context.2That privacy
of the family once meant the noninterference of the state¶ in domestic affairs does not mean
that this is inherently what privacy of the¶ family means today. In contemporary American society, we
accept greater¶ government intervention in spousal relationships as well as in child rearing.¶ To argue that there is less
privacy of the family today because of this development¶ is too broad a claim. To the extent that
family privacy consists¶ of attributes such as independence, freedom of thought, freedom from
coercion,¶ self-development, and pursuing activities of personal interest, government¶
intervention actually can enhance privacy.
No Alt Solvency
Essentialism
Radical feminism can’t actualize change – essentializes identity and social
conditions
Kelly ’03 -- Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at UCONN.
(Kristin A., Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy, ed. By K. Kelly. P. 55-56)//FM
The radical
feminist approach has proved to be a very powerful explanatory tool in helping us to
the
limitations of this approach become apparent when it is applied as a framework for developing
practical solutions to specific problems occurring within the family realm. In the case of
domestic violence, the radical analysis has included a dual emphasis: (1) exposing the political nature of battering and
understand why problems such as domestic violence have received so little public intervention. However,
(2) developing a program of public intervention. During the early days of the battered women’s movement, radical feminist
theories often served as the basis for the development of shelter programs that were explicitly directed at changing women’s
consciousness about the violence in their lives. These activities were designed to help victims see that their experiences of
abuse were widely shared and could be traced to larger patterns of male domination. Along with
liberal feminists,
radical feminists also supported efforts to transform domestic violence into a criminal matter
warranting serious penalties. Although such initiatives were (and are) steps in the right direction, they also have
shortcomings. First, for many women, the radical assertion that “the primary oppression
faced by all women is patriarchy” simply does not ring true. Even women who have experienced
violence at the hands of male partners often feel intense loyalty to these men and find it very hard
to conceptualize them as their primary oppressors. The radical feminist designation of all men as
“oppressors” results in a theory of public and private that does not allow for distinctions
among men. The absence of distinctions is significant because it results in a failure to acknowledge the
reality that many minority men and men from the lower classes are also without power in
our public institutions. Carol Brown, for example, relies on this insight to argue that we have transitioned from a
private to a public patriarchy. Although men have less power to dominate women in the home, the
dynamic of domination has not disappeared: it has simply been transplanted to the public
sphere. Brown’s take: “The power of higher level men over all women has increased while the
power of lower level men over any women has decreased. Even higher level men have lost their personal
control over their women but what they have gained is economic control over the larger society which subordinates women.
The radical
feminist analysis is especially problematic for women of color, some of whom are
likely to experience racism, not sexism, as the predominant source of oppression in their
lives. Likewise, women who are economically disadvantaged often find that the challenges they
face in their day-to-day lives are more clearly connected to their class than to their gender status. It
could reasonably be argued that it is unfair to critique a theory based on the contention that it does not perfectly describe the
internal experiences of all women. However, at least in the case of radical feminism, the
criticism is justified by the
universalism of their claims and solutions. The policy recommendations issuing from a
radical analysis come directly out of the assumption that gender oppression is the source of
all oppression and that women should therefore be eager to uproot patriarchal structures
whenever they encounter them. As with the liberal approach, there is very little room in the radical analysis for
victims of domestic violence who clearly want the violence to stop but are simply not willing to impose legal sanction on their
batterers to achieve that end. As as a result, the very real fear felt by many women that going public with their problems could
result in further victimization - by public officials who harbor racist feelings toward them or their abusers - is disregarded.
Also overlooked is the harsh reality that for many victims, leaving or having their abuser jailed is very likely to result in
impoverishment and homelessness for themselves and their children. What is missing from
the radical analysis
in an adequate appreciation of the variety of costs that can accompany politicization of
issues that have traditionally be understood as private. The radical argument that problems such
as domestic violence are already political because of their basis in patriarchal relations of
oppression and dominance may, in fact, be correct. But accurate or not, there is still a substantial
difference between reconceptualizing something in theory and transforming it in practice.
Misguided or not, many battered
women view their situation as intensely personal and are
reluctant to make use of solutions that depend on the politicization of the details of their
intimate relationships. Ultimately, the essentialistic assumptions implicit in radical theories eventuate in a
scenario where women who do not fit or agree with these interpretations are left to fend for
themselves when facing domestic violence. Ironically, contrary to the intention of radical theories, the
outcome for such women is the reprivatization of the abuse in such a way that it can no
longer be reached by political solutions.
No Social Change
Personal is Political doesn’t solve – turns the alt.
Elshtain ’93 – American ethicist, the laura spelman Rockefeller professor of social
and political ethics in the university of Chicago(Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man,
Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, p.218-219)
What follows from the “personal is political” and the relentless power definition of social
reality? For Atkinson, in her world of Oppressor and Oppressed, the only alternative is to reverse who is
oppressing or metaphysically cannibalizing whom. There is no reconstructive or
transformative vision; rather, we are presented with the ugly form of politics as ressentiment. In Brownmiller’s hard
world, all of the central features of the male power structure remain intact but women come to control these structures
coequally. This will mean a cease-fire in the
sex war. That war can never end, however, given its location
in male being. Brownmiller casually indicates that armies will probably be around for a while and they, too, “must be fully
integrated, as well as our national guard, our state troopers, our local sheriffs’ offices, our district attorneys’ offices, our state
prosecuting attorneys’ offices–in short the nation’s entire lawful power structure (and I mean power in the physical sense)
must be stripped of male dominance and control–if women are to cease being a colonized protectorate of men.” Women
must prepare themselves for combat and guard duty, for militarized “citizenship.”
Brownmiller began plans for the Brave New World by learning “how to fight dirty” and, as a
bonus, learning that I loved it.” The striking thing about Brownmiller’s response to the male
will to power is its own machismo cast: raw power, brute force, martial discipline, uniforms,
militaristic law and order with a feminist face.
Utopian
Radical feminist texts utopian – not realistic
Elshtain ’93 – American ethicist, the laura spelman Rockefeller professor of social
and political ethics in the university of Chicago(Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man,
Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, p.221-223)
In order to evoke my sense of foreboding at the implications of tendencies internal to radical feminist discourse as
political prescription, I must pick up another thread which weaves its way through radical
feminism. The thread is an anti-intellectualism flowing from acceptance of the split in
empiricist epistemology between thought and feeling, reason and passion,
experience and knowledge .From its inception, radical feminism has eschewed what it called
male-identified structures of thought. A politics that “begins with our feelings . . . that’s how we know what’s really
going on,” proclaimed one radical feminist manifesto. What ends do feminists who celebrate a politics of
feeling have in mind insofar as political theory and practice is concerned? There is, first
of all, a yearning for a societas perfecta, a sisterhood of the “feeling,” purified from male rationality. The
tendency to promote what Susan Sontag has called a “rancid and dangerous antithesis between
mind . . . and emotion,” a bifurcation which is not only banal but serves as “one of the roots of fascism” is my concern.
There is more: I mentioned the regressive utopian urge to return to a womb-like
community where no voices speak in discord, where there is only harmony and agreement and love. Su ch communities
provide a total definition of the person: everything one does or says is
personal/political. One no longer speaks as an autonomous individual but as woman-identified woman,
fused with others, seeking union finally with the Great Mother. Charlotte Beradt, in a chilling volume, The Third
Reich of Dreams, reports on dreams, reports on dreams she recorded in the early years of the Third Reich. The dreams demonstrate the conflicts
that arose as individuals strove “to keep politics from robbing their existence of its meaning.” The politics that was robbing lives of meaning was
a totalistic edifice which aimed to consume all of life, to allow for a single public identity. The most poignant aspect of the dreams was the
anxious flight into the only sphere of privacy remaining, the dream, only to discover, in some instances, that one’s dream-thoughts had taken on
the cast of the public world. “I dreamt I was no longer able to speak except in chorus with my group,” said one dreamer to Beradt. The means of
expression characteristic of the totalitarian milieu or the “total community” is the Sprechchor, the chorus, not individuals but vehicles. This is
where dreams of fusion wind up; this is the way they play politically. Cut off from a political imperative, such dreams evoke unconscious
memories of union with the mother, what Freud called the “oceanic feeling,” and lie at the heart of romantic discourse. Adrienne Rich, for
example, writes of “The drive to connect,” The dream of a common language,” in her poem, “Origins and History of Consciousness.”
The
impulse to fuse may work itself out in utopian novels like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a humorous
satire on masculine and feminine. But the radical feminist texts I have criticized as being suffused
with regressive urges are not proffered as romantic dreams but as genuine
blueprints for a realizable future, including Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time which, through a utopian novel, is
nonetheless to be taken seriously, as a vision of the future. What I am saying here is that the way it plays poetically may or may not, depending in
part on the author’s intent, in part on the reader’s mind-set, in part on the social context, usher in politically dangerous demands. This is a
problem radical feminists have yet to consider seriously, in part because their discourse gets in the way.
Indicts
MacKinnon Indite
MacKinnon essentializes women’s experiences – assumes a collective female
experience
Ward 95 – professor of Law and of graduate of Yale law school and BA from Wellesly
college (Cynthia Ward, “The Radical Feminist defense of Individualism,” 884, 885, 1995,
http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1102&context=facpubs)//EM
The concept of selfhood is currently under intense examination by feminists and others.49 In explicit contrast to the liberal
idea that the "self" is coextensive with the physical individual, some theorists discuss the possibility of many "selves"
coexisting within the individual body,50 while others argue the existence and importance of a "collective" self, involving the
shared identity of many individual persons. 51 Various critics have accused Catharine MacKinnon of endorsing both the liberal
MacKinnon, despite her
strong denunciations of liberal epistemology, politics, law, and psychology, is herself a
closet liberal.52 Others have seen fundamental flaws in MacKinnon's discussion of a collective "women's point of view,"
claiming that her analysis assigns women a common identity and that this subordinates
women's diversity, a violation of MacKinnon's own declared commitment to faithfully
represent women's actual practice. 53 Understanding these critiques requires exploration of MacKinnon's theory
individualist and the collective visions of women's selfhood. Some have charged that
as it relates to the concept of women's identity. MacKinnon appears to take three different positions on the question of female
selfhood. At one level she simply sidesteps the question, stating that until we end male domination we cannot know how
women will develop in its absence.54 But critics have pointed out that this answer is troublesome, since it leaves radical
feminist theory without an account of women's ability either to condemn domination
MacKinnon incorrectly identifies liberalism – only wordplay
Ward 95 -- Cynthia Ward, professor of Law and of graduate of Yale law school and
BA from wellesly college, (Cynthia, “The Radical Feminist defense of Individualism,” pg. 891, 1995,
http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1102&context=facpubs)//EM
Finally, the
fact that MacKinnon criticizes the status quo for not providing choice to
women, or for denying them selfhood, is no proof of a necessary link between her
theory and liberalism. Unless we assume up front that the concepts of "choice" and "self" that she uses are liberal
ones-which is the very question at issue-the mere use of these words gets us no closer than we
were before in collecting details about the place of choice in her vision, how it would
be exercised, and in furtherance of what concept of the self. Alternatively, MacKinnon
may use these terms as a way of conducting an internal critique of liberalism-of
showing, in other words, how liberal legalism fails even by its own standards to
deliver equality for women. It is thus somewhat puzzling to observe the intensity
with which some feminists have combed MacKinnon's writings with the apparent
goal of ascribing to her the endorsement of a view that she expressly denounces and
that seems, on a reasonably charitable interpretation, to lie outside the necessary confines of her understandings of women's
situation today. One senses that engaging MacKinnon's theory may be less important to some scholars than discovering ways
to exclude liberalism from legitimate consideration in the feminist lexicon.
A2: Elshtain is Patriarchal
Elshtain not advocating patriarchal notion of family – instead family is critical to
changing the public sphere
Kelly ’03 -- Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at UCONN.
(Kristin A., Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy, ed. By K. Kelly. P. 40-42)//FM
It would be easy to infer that what Elshtain is proposing is nothing more than a return to a
patriarchal model of public and private -- with women relegated to the domestic sphere and
men occupying and controlling the public, political sphere. Relative to domestic violence, it is difficult to
see at first glance how Elshtain’s suggestion that traditional arrangements be preserved could
represent anything but a worsening of the violence. However, examination of her argument
reveals that a principal objective of her analysis is the empowerment of women through
their central position in the private sphere. Along with maternal feminists such as Sara Ruddick, Elshtain
holds that it is in their capacity as mothers and homemakers that women can have the most
profound impact. “The notion, developed most fully by Ruddick, is that the mothering of
small children requires women to develop uniquely maternal values, such as compassion,
humility, attentiveness, sensitivity, and a strong orientation toward preserving life.” The
connection between mothering and the public sphere derives from maternal feminism:
rather than trying to adopt the individualistic and competitive attitudes that characterize
that sphere, women should us their maternal perspective to transform the conduct of
politics. According to Elshtain, accomplishing the latter would not only improve the quality of
government and citizenship-creating what she calls the “ethical polity”-but would also help
to bring about a much needed reevaluation of the private sphere and the activities therein.
Although Elshtain never goes so far as to advocate a policy of absolute non-intervention in cases of domestic violence, she
manifestly thinks
feminists are mistaken in locating the primary source of the violence in
private familial structures. Instead, her analysis suggests that violence within familial relationships
is more likely the result of the conflicts and frustration that are generated when adults leave
the family to engage in activities associated with citizenship and employment. As Elshtain
describes it, when parents return home, they bring their stress and anger with them; and a
consequence, “conflicts that originate ‘outside‘ get displaced ‘inside,’ perhaps into the very
heart of the family’s emotional existence.” Contributing to the potential that such pressures will
result in physical violence the erosion of values such as gentleness, connection, and
responsibility that were traditionally instilled (by women) within the context of the private
family. For example, in Elshtain’s view, the “diseases of nonattachment” that “lead to the inability of the child to modify his
or her aggressive impulses” can be traced to a failure to provide the child with intense emotional ties required as an infant.”
Thus, according to this frame of reference, feminist responses
to violence against women that call for
the politicization of familial relations paradoxically threaten to further devalue the very
institution that stands as the best hope for addressing the root causes of many of the most
serious social ills, including violence.