NEGATIVE - CRITIQUE - FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF PRIVACY 135

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EMPLOYERS GIVE WOMEN LESS PRIVACY BY COMMIDIFYING THEIR EMOTIONS AND BODIES

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.65-66

Women's typically lesser privacy in Western culture is further compounded by the fact that women are expected to give more access to their bodies and their selves, and a norm of self-disclosure on the part of women permeates social interaction (Henley and Freeman 1989). Such disclosure gives power, control, and status to the other person. In general, women have less ability to define their emotions as private. Women are more likely [*66] to encounter expectations that they will manipulate their emotions and sexuality for their work, thus making these ostensibly private aspects of life marketable commodities in the public sphere (Hochschild 1983). Emotional displays become part of the job, such that women in traditionally female- dominated jobs perform emotion labor in order to exhibit stereotypically feminine emotional behavior such as care, sensitivity, and sexual interest. n17 By co-opting their emotional expression and commodifying it for commercial activities, employers again give women less access to a defined and circumscribed private realm of their lives and identities that is protected from public scrutiny. In the last decade of the twentieth century, women are not excluded from public life, but we have not yet "overcome the gender hierarchy that gives men more power than women to draw the line between public and private" (Fraser 1992: 610).

THOSE WITH LESSER POWER (OFTEN WOMEN) IN ORGANIZATIONS HAVE LESSER AMOUNTS OF PRIVACY

These cultural patterns of power in everyday social interaction are compounded by the fact that women tend to hold positions subordinate to men in organizations and, therefore, to be under scrutiny from men in positions of formal authority over them. Furthermore, space allocations in organizations and communities also serve the interests of the powerful by protecting their privacy and facilitating their surveillance of the less powerful (Davis 1990). When men have more power within an organizational setting, as is the case in most work and academic settings, they are also more likely to have private space within the organization, such as a private office rather than an open cubicle. Men's organizational power stems from several sources, including the fact that workplace leadership is typically male, and men have higher status in the culture as a whole. The proportions of men and women in specific positions, the organization of work space, and the process of supervision all contribute to the lesser privacy of individuals with less power in organizations.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT SHOWS THE INEQUALITY OF VARIOUS WORKPLACE PRIVACY PROTECTIONS

Thus, the issue of sexual harassment challenges the separation of public and private spheres by revealing the arbitrariness of its boundary. The contingency of discursive boundary setting and maintaining on power is evident [*64] in the dynamics of unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion forms of harassment, in which systemic power (race, class, and gender domination) translates into the protection of privacy for those with more power, and the invasion of privacy for those with less. Not only is sexual behavior, which supposedly belongs in the private sphere, occurring in the civil sphere of the workplace, but also, the individual privacy of employees in the workplace is vulnerable to invasion depending on social power. Men have more power to separate public and private because they have more public power, and public power ultimately engenders more private power as well. Women have less power to define the public/private boundary in their lives, especially when in the public sphere, partly because they have historically been equated with the private. n14

SEXUAL HARASSMENT IS A FORM OF INVASION OF SEXUAL PRIVACY

Women's lesser privacy mediates women's greater vulnerability to unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. In these instances of sexual harassment, the behavior distorts the balance of a social relationship by seeking a level of intimacy beyond that which defines the nature of the relationship (Gruber 1992). The result of this intrusion is an invasion of sexual privacy, in which a more powerful person (in the organizational context and/or in the larger social context) attempts to redefine the relationship according to self-interest. Victims of these types of sexual harassment are vulnerable to such invasions of sexual privacy because they tend to be individuals lacking in structural power due to both sociocultural and organizational reasons (Tangri et al. 1982; Fain and Anderton 1987).

INCREASING EMPLOYMENT PRIVACY EXCLUDES AND SUBORDINATES WOMEN

Pat Armstrong, Prof. of Canadian Studies at Carlton University, 1997; CHALLENGING THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DIVIDE, "Restructuring Public and Private: Women's Paid and Unpaid Work," EE2001hxm p. 53-54

At the same time governments at all levels are significantly reducing funding for education, health, and welfare. These cut backs have an impact on women as both providers and users, given that they are the majority of both. In terms of employment, jobs are being eliminated rapidly in these areas, and work is increasingly being contracted out to private sector firms that pay women less and offer less job protection (Armstrong and Armstrong 1996) . New work organization techniques transferred from the private sector are transforming many of the public sector jobs that remain (Armstrong et al. 1994). In the name of improving quality, public sector employers are appealing to women's desire to provide high quality services, to participate in decision-making, and to work in teams as a way of re-engineering work. But too often these processes end up deskilling the job. At the same time these private sector techniques frequently pit women against each other, undermining their traditional ways of working together. With government cutbacks, private sector for-profit firms are moving in to fill the demand for services. These employers tend to be nonunion. Moreover, they are more likely than public sector employers to rely on part-time and short-term work, to vary their hours in ways that make it difficult for women to arrange child care, and to pay low wages and benefits. Because women form the majority of this labour force, the impact will be greatest on them.

PRIVATIZATION WITHIN THE ECONOMIC AND EMPLOYMENT SPHERE ONLY SUBORDINATES WOMEN

Seyla Benhabib, Prof. of Government at Harvard University, 1998; FEMINISM, THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE, "Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and JurgenHabermas", EE2001-hxm p. 86

In the emergence of Western modernity, a second set of privacy rights accompany the eventual establishment of the liberal separation of the church and state. These are privacy rights pertaining to economic liberties. The development of commodity relations in the market-place and of capitalism does not only mean 'the rise of the social', in Arendtian terms. Along with the socialization of the economy, that is along with the decline of subsistence-type household economies and the eventual emergence of national markets, a parallel development establishing the 'privacy' of economic markets takes place. in this context 'privacy' means first and foremost non- interference by the political state in the free flow of commodity relations, and in particular non-intervention in the free market of labour-power.