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 80s 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
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

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:

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
communication that manifests power and has implications for defining one's privacy.

(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

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
context of ideological

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

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
that are insulated from public access (Davis 1990).

(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

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
science, medicine, and law (Foucault 1977).

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

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
empirical literature on the subject.

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

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 neededare pushing us closer and closer to war.

unless, as the doomsayers claim, we collectively harbor a death wish and no not really want to look closely

The cause of nuclear arms

proliferation is militarism. What is the cause of militarism? The traditional militarist
at dynamics propelling us steadily toward the brink of extinction.

explanation is that the masters of war in the military-industrial complex profit 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 the nuclear arms race that ignore the cultural

patriarchies. Militarism and warfare are

continual features of patriarchal society because they reflect and instill
orientation of the nations involved: They are

patriarchal values and fulfill essential needs of such a system.

Acknowledging the
context of patriarchal 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

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
sexuaIity abortion facilitates womens heterosexual availability. In other words,

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

the liberal ideal of the private and privacy as an ideal has been in liberal terms
holds that, 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 tohence should properly participate inshaping the internal alignments of
the private or distributing its internal forces. It s 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
process.

a showing of coercion voids this presumption. One would allow force in privatethe why doesnt she
leave question asked of battered women- is a question given its urgency by the social meaning of the

for women the measure of the intimacy has been the

measure of the oppression. This is why feminism has had to explode the
private as a sphere of choice. But

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 ishence, we areseen
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 indecencywhich was the specific barrier to
effective choice in Harrisis 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 womans 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 privatethat 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 TwentyFifth 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=citnav)//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 womans 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 laws tacit encouragement and
support. Indeed, we can see this pattern in recent legislative and prosecutorial efforts to control
womens conduct during pregnancy in the form of fetal protection laws. These laws are premised on the
notion that womens 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

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
is not prosecuted. The rhetoric of

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. Womens
work is discredited when the law refuses to enforce the mans 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 wifes services, the law implies that household work is not

These
are important messages, for denying womans humanity and the value
of her traditional work are key ideological components in maintaining
womans subordinate status. The message of womens inferiority is
compounded by the totality of the laws 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 womens day-to-day
concerns reflects and underscores their insignificance. Thus, the legal
orders overall contribution to the devaluation of women is greater
real work in the way that the type of work subject to contract in the public sphere is real work.

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
the terms "private" and
"public." These terms, after all, are 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
In general, critical theory needs to take a harder, more critical look at

privacy, which often function ideologically to delimit the boundaries of the public sphere in ways that

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
disadvantage subordinate social groups.

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

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"
cases,

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

This shows once again that the lifting of formal restrictions on

public sphere participation does not suffice to ensure inclusion in practice . On
and subordination.

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
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 womens individuality and the significance of social context to its
free realization. Historic changes and contemporary controversies mean that it is extremely difficult
Likewise,

to pinpoint the liberal feminist position on the public/private dichotomy. Still, even within this diversity,

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 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

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 womens interests at all. From MacKinnons 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 MacKinnons 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 womens freedom that should be challenged .
the strongest criticism that radical feminists have of this position. For 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
MacKinnons 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. Put ting 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

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
together as equals, despite their differences.

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 life-threatening 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 womans 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 womans
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

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
they now do, disadvantage women because of their sex.

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 MacKinnons
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 male-dominated 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 womens exploited labor; has preserved the
central institutions whereby women are deprived of identity, autonomy, control and self-definition

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 Sandels 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

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
the state, liberals think that the state can only ensure these goods for individuals indirectly.

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

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,
women, or resent, fear, or are indifferent to the pursuit of independence by women.31

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

By protecting existing forms of intimate association,

privacy rights suppress legitimate differences between individuals over sexroles, 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.
because it is intimate and chosen.

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

MacKinnons 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 states 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 womens 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, governments 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 povertycaused 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 deep-seated 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
statutes 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 womens 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 notjustthatmenenjoyakindofprivacyinthefamilythatwomenandchildrendonotenjoy(but
rathertoooftensufferunder).

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 TwentyFifth 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=citnav)//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 womens 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

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
been stunned by the depth of social resistance to change. Although

seriousness and pervasiveness of battering, but more significantly, the interconnectedness of battering

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 .
with so many other aspects of family life and gender relations.

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 Nussbaums

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.
complicity, and involved feminists in active controversy over the boundaries of victimization.

Privacy says that what goes on in the violent relationship should not be the subject of state or community

Privacy operates
as a mask for inequality, protecting male violence against women.
intervention. Privacy says that it as an individual and not a systemic problem.

Liberal legal equality subordinates othersfails 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 womens behavior psychologically,
through battered woman syndrome, which is offered to explain failure to separate as well as other aspects

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.
of the womans perceptions and behavior.

Explanations for failure to leave are understood as focusing on victimization- in part because they explain

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 Finemans work has
failure.

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

This view of
agency as the functioning of an autonomous, mobile, individual actor has a
behind obstacles or off the field, you get to be helped back on so that you too can play.

flip side of victimization, with important consequences for battered women. It

is difficult- it may be impossible- to represent agency and struggle in
womens 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 32version 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 liberalisms 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 come as often from liberal as from radical camps. Thus, when

critical feminist

theorists joint the

challenge to liberal legalism,

they often do so on

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 states central objective lies in maximizing
individuals freedom to pursue their own objectives to an extent
consistent with the same freedom for others. Implicit is in this vision are several
somewhat modified grounds. Their opposition tends

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

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.
such as West, these

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 womens 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

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 womens intimate
foundered.

connection to others through childbirth and identification with primary

caretakers, how much to cultural norms that encourage womens
deference, empathy, and disproportionate assumption of nurturing
responsibilities, and how much to inequalities in womens 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 laws 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
orders own aspirations. These limitations in conventional doctrine are
particularly apparent in the laws consistently inconsistent analysis of
gender difference. Decision makers have often reached identical legal results from competing
Similar problems arise with the legal ideology that underpins contemporary liberal frameworks.

factual premises. In other cases, the same notions about sexual distinctiveness have yielded opposite
conclusions. Identical assumptions about womens 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

womens 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 Jelineks 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 longstanding rape myths and norms about female sexuality that have
made womens 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 legalisms
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 womens
options. Feminists have provided critical readings of womens
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 womens 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 womens 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 legalisms fundamentality naturalizes gender as

prior to the law obliterating the contingency of gender
Murphy 97 Professor at Queens University School of Law (Thrse
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

the building blocks of liberal legalism

privacy, autonomy, consent and equal treatment with any consistent success.
In fact, liberal legalism feminisms 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
since legal feminism wielded

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
Courts 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 states 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 1The state does this by centering its selfrestraint on body and home, especially bedroom . By staying out of marriage and the
family, prominently meaning sexuality - -that is to say, heterosexualityfrom contraception through

law of privacy proposes to guarantee

individual bodily integrity, personal exercise of moral intelligence, and
freedom of intimacy. 11 But if one asks whether womens 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 womans legal right to privacy as a means
of subordinating womens collective needs to the imperatives of male
supremacy. This is my retrospective on Roe v. Wade. Reproduction is sexual, men control sexuality,
pornography to the abortion decision, the

and the state supports the interest of men as a group. Roe does not contradict this. So why was abortion

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
legalized?

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 pornographyobscenitywill be prohibited enough to keep

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
pornography desirable without ever making it truly illegitimate or unavailable.

parallel terms, abortions 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 womens repressive socialization to passivity and coolness (so-called
frigidity), in womens 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 expressedthese issues are not even
available to be considered. Civilizations answer to these questions fuses womens reproductivity with

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 womans right to refuse sex. In this notion
our attributed sexuality in its definition of what a woman is.

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 boththen 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 sexThe question is, what sexuality shall women be liberated to

To address this requires reformulating the problem of sexuality from

the repression of drives by civilization to the oppression of women by men.
enjoy? 13

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

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
As several critics have observed, the

by many. A singular choice yields eccentricity, group choices produce a sustaining cultural community that

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
allows the pursuit of a way of life. By their very nature

value of cultural diversity as a good in itself.

Law/State
Law normalizes male-centered protect males,
marginalizing womens 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. 5556)//CC

Throughout the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence, the primary

linguists of law have almost exclusively been menwhite, 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 othersBecause 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 malecentered 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 womens 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. 5657)//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
womens 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

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
closest to achieving its highest formal criterion of distanced aperspectivity.

conforms to precedent, to facts, to legislative intent, it will most closely enforce socially male norms and

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 womens social situations and
experiences.
most thoroughly preclude questioning their content as having a point of view at all. 132

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

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
vantage point of philosophical criticism,

ideological formulation, the private/public distinction in legal theory reverses the dependency between

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
social institutions and legal categories (1978a: 16-18). For example,

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

law provides an ideal vision of freedom and equality that is an historic advance over
actually serves as a formal
framework for the realization of private power and domination.
sure, bourgeois

doctrines that stressed beliefs in natural superiority. Yet, it

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 Womens Studies at
Arizona University (Louise Marie, Ph.D, Sociology and Womens 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 equitys 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-economygender-equality/)//EM

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.
They might have added that

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chairing the first-ever Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) HighLevel Policy Dialogue on Women and the Economy, made this point emphatically: By

increasing
womens 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 womens 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 worlds
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 womens 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 worlds poor, more than 60% of the worlds hungry, hold less
than 20 percent of the worlds 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,

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 Sub-Saharan Africa,
women hold only three percent of CEO positions and 15 percent of board seats.

its 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

The Asia and Pacific region is losing

$42 billion to $47 billion annually because of womens limited access
doubled economic growth over that time period.

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

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 ones 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
Most

longer any battlefield. Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a crucial, largescale conventional war it would refrain from using its 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,

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
said that

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

feminist interpretations of militarisation, concluding

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.
said. She went on to discuss several
that they

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, 239256]//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 functionnot 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

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
authority and subjectivity in an image that is in

of securitythe preservation of borders is also recognizable in the conceptual domain of the international

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).
and in the adherence to a binary materiality of gender.

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
1

government. 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 womens 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

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
common in the 1960s and 1970s such as the

faced if they wished to delay or even forego, marriage and child-bearing, and the high price that was
2

But the
slogan that the personal is political was, as well, a way of encapsulating
womens 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
demanded of them if they did so in social exclusion, ostracism, harassment and intimidation.

personal deficiencies of particular women and men, but the predictable, and sometimes intentional, result

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
of the ways in which societies distribute and justify power over others. But,

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
3

the US constitution supports

a distinctive right to privacy that is not simply a right to marry, procreate and
misrepresentation. It dominates discussion of the extent to which

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 womens rights: in other words, to take effective steps to stop violence against

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
women.

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. Womens 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

Violence
against women exists everywhere but it is not an inevitable feature of
life for all. The power to invade the private realm of womens
womens rights activists continues to scrutinize and challenge violence against women.

bodies is not easily curtailed by

legislation

scrutiny and surveillance or by policies and

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 womans decision to abort would have no

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 Courts response resembles the logic by which women
claim on public support and would genuinely not be seen as burdened by that deprivation.

are supposed to consent to sex. Preclude the alternatives, then call the sole remaining option her choice.

alternatives are precluded prior to the reach of the chosen

legal doctrine. They are precluded by conditions of sex, race, and classthe 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 point is that the

the very things feminism regards as central to the subjection of womenthe very place, the body; the
very relations, heterosexual; the very activities, intercourse and reproduction; and the very feelings,

the legal
concept of privacy can and has shielded the place of battery marital rape, and
womens 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
intimateform the core of what is covered by privacy doctrine. From this perspective,

expressionwithout 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 expense . To fail to

recognize the meaning of the private is in the ideology and

reality of womens 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

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
with why we cant organize women on the abortion issue.

the private spheres 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 womens shared experience and that
mystifies the unity among the spheres of womens violation . It is a very
material division that keeps the private beyond public redress and
depoliticizes womens 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

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.
a class. From this perspective,

"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 self-determination." 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
MacKinnon makes this point explicit:

intimate relationships. The aspects of her work that receives much less support in her assertion- made also

oppression of women will always result from strict boundaries

between public and private, and therefor the distinction should be
eliminated.
by Firestone- that the

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,

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
because it holds that rights to privacy must conflict with the equality of women and men.

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 Roes 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 Roes
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 constitutions 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

Womens perspectives are trivialized as private or
womens issues in traditional public sphere liberal
legalism doesnt 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

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
force.

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.

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
Unfortunately,

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 cant 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 mens 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

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
true of the struggle to eradicate sexism

willingness to assume equal responsibility in feminist struggle, performing whatever tasks are
necessary, women should affirm their revolutionary work by acknowledging
them as comrades in struggle.

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/10822/5536
45/beckerEmily.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 womens 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 womens 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 womens
empowerment and higher rates of terrorism. Gender equality and womens
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

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 Banks Millennium
measures when looking holistically at the status of women in a society.

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

If the link
between gender equality, womens 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 womens
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.
by both gender equality and womens empowerment) affects the rates of 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 is depicted as a
tool for safeguarding security, ranging from biometric systems at airports to nannycams in
Surveillance intersects with security in interesting ways. Often,

homes. Discourses about surveillance and security typically present false trade-offs, frequently between

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.
security and privacy. This framing

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

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,
identification tags. This general form of surveillance, which could be

consideration, necessarily of the next-to-impossible rules imposed upon welfare recipients to begin with.

profusion of surveillance
technologies throughout societies in no way indicates the
democratization of surveillance. Surveillance both grows out of and gives rise to power
Both social sorting and marginalizing surveillance illustrate that the

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

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
differentiation and the automation of

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

The voyeuristic uses of video surveillance are not all

that surprising: Usually men sit comfortably in control rooms where
they monitor unsuspecting womenand othersfrom 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
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 technologies.

Surveillance is gendered in private and public spaces

used to control womens 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

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 (2000, 2002)
contexts and/or institutional relations. Surveillance technologies fit neatly within this frame.

this effectively masculinizes the spaces under observation because (a)

video surveillance occurs in traditionally feminine spaces (e.g., of shopping, public
argued,

(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
transportation, etc.);

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 system by taking unreported tips (usually for performing sexual acts). Finally,

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.
Jennifer Wesely and Emily Gaardner (2004) explained how

Surveillance is genderedmasculine 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
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
stations, railway stations and busy bus stops).

the people under surveillance are women. However, there are other, more complicated features, of this

the masculine culture of technology

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
gender structure. In the world of surveillance
(Wajcman, 1991)

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

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
(Koskela, 2000).

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: 99100) 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

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
explicit.

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 Natl

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 high-tech 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

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
Meanwhile,

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), terrorismespecially 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 creation of the Department of Homeland Security to
At least

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

the
war on terror has become the central layer through which all
conceivable national security threats are filtered and weighed for importance,
screening) and the outsourcing of lucrative security contracts to private industries. In these ways,

which can be seen readily with the specious conflation of terrorism with illegal immigration, identity theft,
and even public protest.

framing of insecurity around terrorism tends to occlude, among other

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
The

things,

policies blocking their paths. These trends are, of course, interlinked. In current incarnations of economic

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.
globalization,

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, Allens important work on the
normative value of privacy and private choice for women suggests that

we

might

enlist womens

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

privacy should rid itself of the legacy of domestic life as

the sphere of confinement, subordination, and sacrifice of self.63 One
part of womens privacy problem has been too much of the wrong kind
of privacy-unwanted isolation, the legacy of separate spheres and of norms of maternal
adequate account of

self-sacrifice, the brutal injustice of the laws drawing the curtain on private life, and leaving married
women largely unprotected against inti-mate violence. As Allen has argued, women have not had enough

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 does Allen) that this idea of privacy is compatible with a
of the right kind of privacy.65

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

Given feminisms interest in

womens freedom to re-evaluate and escape oppressive
connections,70 this facet of privacy should be attractive.
freedom 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 dont 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 womens 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 self-determination), selfdevelopment, 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 Allens 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

privacy

womens accounts of experience with bad forms of

that denied them autonomy and rendered them vulnerable to violence and abuse (such as the

motivated legal and social steps

toward securing better forms of privacy for them. For instance, one plausible
law of coverture and the ideology of separate spheres)

interpretation of nineteenth-century feminist demands for a right to self-ownership in marriage80 and a

voluntary marriage81 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 Richardss
work suggests, abolitionist feminism would be a rich resource for such motivating stories.82 Richards
characterizes the legacy of abolitionist feminisms 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 womens 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 womens 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 self-

Seclusion and subordination meant that women generally were

unable to utilize their full capacities to participate in society . Maternal and social
expression."(82)

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 underparticipation 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
Allens 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 Siegels historical analysis of the evolving
legal treatment of violence against women in the home powerfully demonstrates how, even after the laws
formal repudiation of the idea of coverture and a husbands 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

This does not mean that there is a

need to destroy the line between the public and private totally, but theneedto
state/family aspects of the public/private must take place.

redefinethislineinabackgroundofequality . 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 states core commitment to protect its citizens against

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 self-development, 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 privacys legacy of confinement and subordination, as
well as the immunity of private aggression from the laws 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.
private aggression.1m Accordingly, 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
Pennsylvanias 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

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 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 womens
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
by American women.

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 sexual inequality in the private
sphere can undercut decisional privacy rights established by law on behalf of women.

not reasons to reject privacy,

the private sphere,

But these are

or the decisional privacy right

of Roe v. 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

Decisional privacy must be recognized as one of the

important remedies for the problem of sexual inequality and womens
lack of meaningful privacy. Economic equality, by which I mean equal employment
among women.

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 selfrenunciation 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 womens 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

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
prestige to the extent of their individual capabilities. That is,

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

but gender-based
hierarchy will dissolve. It would make sense in such a world to outlaw certain forms of
used power over women for this purpose. Hierarchy will continue,

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

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. Sterns study of Germanys
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 womanidentified 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 womens 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
Bethke

communes of the 19603 and a wild boy who grew up alone in France and was subsequently incapable of

family must be understood as a

categorical imperative of human existence. Further, although she concurs with
living in society, Elshtain makes the strong case that the

many of the feminist positions as to why the current configurations of the public/private split hurt women,

feminists must subordinate their concerns as long as there

is any danger that the proposed solutions will interfere with childrens
need for long-term, intergenerational ties with specific adults. The
feminist political thinker must similarly ask at what price she would
she maintains that

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

feminists should support maintaining a

clear split between private and public.
keeping with this view, she is adamant that

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)
Firestones futureand with this I shall lead into the disturbing question of an antidemocratic impulse
in radical feminist politicsoffers 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 Firestones ideology can
work to achieve Firestones future by seizing control of reproduction and
owning her own body. A hard-edged, calculated intrusion of market language into all aspects of
lifeonce the private is deprivatized is characteristic of Firestones 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 Richs 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 Firestones 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

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.
parents, may bargain for the latest deal in contracted households.

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 Dalys 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 Dalys 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 readers mind the suspicion that the describer
protests too much, that things cant 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 males 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 womens 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

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
and self-expression."(82)

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 underparticipation 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 parttime--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

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.
openness in public life are offered in tandem.

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

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
many.

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

In short, whether we look at principles

of democratic government, or at the demands of sexual equality, a concern for
peoples 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
justified, and to condemn it, where it is illegitimate.

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
peoples claims to personal life, in a democracy, must take account of other peoples interests in political
participation and judgement and vice-versa. 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

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 societys 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
republican ideas about politics. Thus, I will argue

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

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
must be granted about politics in a democracy.

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

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
adequately protect the legitimate interests of individuals. The other, is 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). Mills 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 Greenwald- Privacy is Necessary for Creativity
http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/03/glenn-greenwaldprivacy-is-necessary.html, March 31, 2014)//CC
In an article in Salon, "Surveillance breeds conformity" Natasha Lennard spoke with Glenn Greenwald. He

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 its essential to what
it means to be human that we have a private life. We interact with other
explained why

human beings as social animals, and live part of our lives in the public eye thats crucial thats why if
you put someone in solitary confinement for 23 and a half hours a day like we do in U.S. prisons, its 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. Thats why people have always sought out
realms where they can conduct themselves with anonymity and
privacy. Where there arent other human eyes forming judgments and
posing decrees about what they should and shouldnt 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

We can be free of shame and guilt and embarrassment;

its 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
theyre doing in other words, nothing that is deviant or dissenting or disruptive. It breeds
condemn us for doing.

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

"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 youre 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."
things because they now feel they're being monitored." And here with Advocate.com:

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/pri
vacy/why-care-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."

Most people are afraid to stand apart, to be different, if it means being subject to piercing

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."
scrutiny.

10

Under 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

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
under rigid control.

11

Therefore

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

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
attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not.

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 decideit 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-2012-4-369381.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 persons 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, Hyry and Takala 2001, Rssler 2005)

the primary task of privacy with respect to the individual

is to protect his or her autonomy. For example, Joseph Kupfer (1987:8182) 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
have indicated that

by Beate Rssler in her book, The Value of Privacy (2005), which centers on the question of why we

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 ones 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
ones 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
persons control over the access and use of information about himself
value privacy. Rssler endeavors to show that

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 self-realization 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 decisionmaking 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 womens
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/cpo
meroy.html)//CC
"Public

and private are imbedded within a dense web of associational meanings and
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
intimations

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

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
associated with the private, and men with the public.

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 selfdevelopment. 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, selfdevelopment, and pursuing activities of personal interest, government
intervention actually can enhance privacy.

No Alt Solvency

Essentialism
Radical feminism cant 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 understand why problems such as domestic violence have received so little public

However, 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
intervention.

has included a dual emphasis: (1) exposing the political nature of battering and (2) developing a program
of public intervention. During the early days of the battered womens movement, radical feminist theories
often served as the basis for the development of shelter programs that were explicitly directed at changing
womens 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

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.
Browns 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
domination.

men have lost their personal control over their women but what they have gained is economic control over

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
the larger society which subordinates women. The

theory based on the contention that it does not perfectly describe the internal experiences of all women.

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
However, at least in the case of radical feminism,

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

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.
their children.

No Social Change
Personal is Political doesnt 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 Brownmillers 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 officesin short the nations entire lawful power
structure (and I mean power in the physical sense) must be stripped of male dominance and controlif

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 Brownmillers
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.
women are to cease being a colonized protectorate of men.

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 maleidentified structures of thought. A politics that begins with our feelings . . . thats how we know
whats 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. Such 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 ones 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,

The impulse to fuse may work itself out in

utopian novels like Charlotte Perkins Gilmans 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 Piercys Woman on the Edge of Time which,
Origins and History of Consciousness.

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 authors intent, in part on the readers 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 womens 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 individualist and the

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
collective visions of women's selfhood. Some have charged that

Understanding these critiques requires exploration of MacKinnon's theory 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

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
Finally,

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 Elshtains
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 familys
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 Elshtains 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.