NEGATIVE - CRITIQUE - FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF PRIVACY 131

A EXT–PRIVACY LAW LINKS–PRIVACY LAW HURTS WOMEN MOST

WOMEN ARE AFFORDED LESS PRIVACY BECAUSE THEY HAVE LESS SOCIAL POWER

Louise Marie Roth, "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 , EE2001-JGM, P.64-65

Culturally, women have less privacy in all mixed-sex interactions because of their generally lesser social power. Women are subject to more surveillance than men, n15 and this is particularly evident in the dynamics surrounding violence against women such as rape, sexual harassment,and domestic violence. n16 Sexuality is less private for women, partly because women's bodies are much more often sexualized and exposed in Western culture. Representations of female sexuality, such as images of female nudity, are commodified and ubiquitous in public advertising (Wolf 1991; [*65] Renzetti and Curran 1995). Women's clothing often prevents concealment of the body by revealing more of their shape, which is then perpetually under scrutiny (Brownmiller 1984; Wolf 1991; Schur 1984). Additionally, women's roles in their families are subject to more scrutiny than men's (Schur 1984). For example, news stories are more likely to mention the subject's sex, physical appearance, or marital and family status when their subject is a woman (Foreit et al. 1980; Renzetti and Curran 1995). Women have had less ability in this culture to draw the line between public and private, and to circumscribe a realm of privacy inaccessible to surveillance and violation by others (Fraser 1992; MacKinnon 1983).

THE NOTION OF PRIVACY IMPLICITLY DENOTES THAT MAN HAS PRIVACY AND WOMAN CONSENTS TO THIS PRIVACY BECAUSE OF HER LACK OF RELATIVE POWER

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Catharine A. MacKinnon is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, March, 1991; Yale Law Journal, " Reflections on Sex Equality Under Law," EE2001-hxm P.

The law of reproductive control has developed largely as a branch of the law of privacy, the law that keeps out observing outsiders. Sometimes it has. n137 The problem is that while the private has been a refuge for some, it has been a hellhole for others, often at the same time. In gendered light, the law's privacy is a sphere of sanctified isolation, impunity, and unaccountability. It surrounds the individual in his habitat. It belongs to the individual with power. Women have been accorded neither individuality nor power. Privacy follows those with power wherever they go, like and as consent follows women. When the person with privacy is having his privacy, the person without power is tacitly imagined to be consenting. At whatever time and place man has privacy, woman wants to have happen, or lets happen, whatever he does to her. Everyone is implicitly equal in there. If the woman needs something -- say, equality -- to make these assumptions real, privacy law does nothing for her, and even ideologically undermines the state intervention that might provide the preconditions for its meaningful exercise. n138 The private is a distinctive sphere of women's inequality to men. Because this has not been recognized, the doctrine of privacy has become the triumph of the state's abdication of women in the name of freedom and self-determination. n139

INCREASING PRIVACY WILL INCREASE GENDER INEQUALITY

Susan B. Boyd, Chair in Feminist Legal Studies and Prof. of Law at University of British Columbia, 1997; CHALLENGING THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DIVIDE," Challenging the Public/Private Divide: An Overview," EE2001hxm p. 19

In the current period of restructuring, deregulation, and privatization, the historically contingent lines between public and private are being redrawn, with the private sphere being expected to assume greater responsibility for things that were once viewed as 'public' (Brodie 1994; Kline this volume). This realignment of public and private has highly gendered implications (Armstrong this volume; Brodie ibid.) and is intrinsically connected to the familial ideology outlined above. A renewed emphasis on the importance of the heterosexual patriarchal family as the fundamental building block in restructuring is evident. Families are expected to undertake caring functions for those who are ill, as hospitals cut back, as well as for children and the elderly (Armstrong this volume). As provinces Such as Alberta shift responsibility for social assistance and child welfare to the private sphere, families and non-profit and for-profit organizations are expected to assume responsibility for certain aspects of that system (Kline this volume). Invocations of community responsibility are prevalent, and rather than 'community' assuming a public or collective meaning, in this context it is a tool of privatization. Given the high proportion of women in the ranks of those who perform volunteer, 'community,' and 'family' work in Canadian society (Armstrong this volume; Duchesne 1989), It is they who will be expected to assume the lion's share of low-paid and unremunerated work as society is restructured in the interests of capital.

GOVERNMENT ACCEPTANCE OF THE PRIVATE SPHERE HAS LEFT ISSUES IMPORTANT TO WOMEN OUTSIDE THE PUBLICARENA

Charles Sykes, Senior Fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Institute,

THE END OF PRIVACY, 1999, EE2001-JGM, p.227

Democratic society separates areas that are subject to government control from those private zones where individuals are free to make their own choices and live their own lives. "The state does this by centering its self-restraint on body and home, especially bedrooms," MacKinnon writes. "By staying out of marriage and the family-essentially meaning sexuality, that is, heterosexuality-from contraception through pornography to the abortion decision, the law of privacy proposed to guarantee individual body integrity, personal exercise of moral intelligence and freedom of intimacy." But MacKinnon rejects such restraint, because women had no guarantee that they had access to such rights. There could he no "inviolable personality" protected by privacy because women were not inviolable. "For women the measure of the intimacy has been the measure of the oppression," she declaimed. "This is why feminism has bad to explode the private. This is why feminism has seen the personal as the political. The private is public for those for whom the personal is political. In this sense, for women there is no private.... Feminism confronts the fact that women have no privacy to lose or to guarantee."9 In tier critique of privacy, feminist theorist Susan Moller Okin similarly argued, "The protection of the privacy of the domestic sphere in which inequality exists is the protection of the right of the strong to exploit and abuse the weak."10

SOCIAL POWER TO DEFINE AND THUS EXCLUDE ARE INHERNET IN INSTITUTIONAL DISCIPLINES

All forms of social power are reinforced by institutional disciplines, including law, which justify the perpetuation of inequality within a juridico- social 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, [*57] and political inequality within a context of ideological egalitarianism by attributing inequalities to the observable attributes of individuals rather than to structural processes that differentially affect individuals depending on their position in the social order.

CULTURAL EXPRESSION OF POWER ARE HEGEMONIC FORCES WHICH MAGNIFY INEQUALITY

Power is unequally distributed among groups in all large-scale, complex societies. The cultures of stratified societies typically reflect and express power inequality (Wrong 1995). According to Wrong (1995), this is the basis for the "hegemony" of the more powerful group, which is encoded in a culture's modes of activity and expression, including language. It is in this sense that power affects the construction of discourse. Cultural expressions of power, including discourses, are reflections of systemic power, according to which differential privilege magnifies inequality in intermember power over time and solidifies into power held by, and exercised for, a group (Lehman 1977). "When power is an aspect of recurrent, patterned interactions, it is a structural attribute" (Lehman 1977, 44). Gender, race, and class stratification are structural attributes that express systemic power, whereby a group defined by a common attribute maintains power for the benefit of other members of the group.