I Am Still Trying to Get Our Hands on a Major Book Related to the File, So Stay Tuned For

Notes

I am still trying to get our hands on a major book related to the file, so stay tuned for more evidence in wave 2.

I thought we had more aff answers related to the law in the works, but I plan to spruce up that part of the file in the near future.

Thanks to Atticus, Carla, Anderson, David, Diego, Mark, Lucy, Vincent, and Anna for all your hard work on this file!

1NC

Government patriarchy ensures that privacy is deployed to solidify existing hierarchies and bolster its interlocking systems of oppression

McGill ‘9 – Professor and on the Faculty of Law at University of Ontario (Jena, Lessons from the Identity Trail, Ch. 9 “What have you done for me Lately? Reflections on Redeeming Privacy for Battered Women,” ed. by Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves, and Carole Lucock, p. 157-172)//DWB

The systems of patriarchy and its interlocking systems of oppression, including racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, and neo-colonialism, dictate whether and how privacy is accessed (or rendered inaccessible), experienced (or not expe-rienced), valued (or undervalued), and protected (or not). In the case of woman battering, it is clear that the patriarchal positioning of privacy informs the deter-mination of whose privacy “counts,” such that men’s privacy rights “trump" women's, as demonstrated in the preceding section. Patriarchy situates men as the dominant, defines the “right to be let alone” with reference to men’s needs and desires, and employs privacy to accomplish patriarchy’s goals, which include the subordination of women. Patriarchy and its interlocking oppressions thereby permit those with power (men) to act with impunity toward those with less power (women), in accordance with the systemic privileging of men that is foundational to patriarchy in all spheres of society.¶ Privacy is deployed along the fault lines of patriarchy to solidify existing hier-archies and bolster the project of patriarchy and its interlocking oppressions. We thereby find ourselves in a situation where “[t]o the extent that the government ¶ is infused with patriarchal, heterosexual ideals, men’s and women’s privacy rights are likely to reflect patriarchal, heterosexual ideals of [privacy],” which quite simply are not attuned to the needs and desires of women. The consequences are predictably detrimental to women, and include the privileging of men’s privacy in the home such that woman abuse is concealed from sight. The problem, however, is not privacy itself, but the fact that privacy exists within a‘constricted referential universe”43 where existing lines of power defined by gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality dictate the form privacy will take and the ways it will be employed.¶ Accepting that the source of the privacy problem is not the concept of privacy itself, but the ways in which privacy is accessed, employed, and enforced within confines of a system circumscribed by patriarchy and its interlocking oppressions leads privacy-rejection feminists to conclude that within the limits of a society characterized by inequality, it makes no sense to devote time or resources to privacy. Faced with the immensity of the ubiquitous obstacle of patriarchy, privacy-rejection feminists halt their analyses and discard privacy outright, apparently concluding that privacy might be redeemed for women only when it can be employed and accessed in the context of real equality. Conversely, I remain hopeful about privacy's present potential as a tool for the protection of mattered women, even within the confines of inequality. Feminists must continue to challenge the particular limits of patriarchy that circumscribe privacy for women, and work toward affecting the kinds of systemic change required to realize equality in the long term; however, we must keep women safe and alive in order to do so. Equality may be the long-term goal, but as a “stop-gap” measure to ensure battered women’s safety right now, privacy is worthy of our time and resources.¶ Feminist critiques of privacy have recognized the limits of privacy as it is currently defined and employed. Acknowledging these limits does not, however, automatically mandate a blanket negation of privacy itself, and doing so risks implied acceptance of the status quo. More importantly, perhaps, rejecting privacy simply does not reflect the realities of women’s lives, for whether we love or hate it, reject or accept it, privacy matters. It can and does play an important role in battered women's lives, as demonstrated in theory and confirmed in reality' by my experience working in a battered women’s shelter. If and when systemic equality is realized, woman battering itself may become a relic of history, doing away with the need for strong privacy protections behind which battered women may “hide” in order to secure their safety. Ultimately, of course, this is the world I want to live in—one where systemic equality dictates that woman battering is simply unthinkable. In the meantime, however, I am willing to use all available ¶ resources, including imperfect privacy, to keep battered women safe from violent partners.¶ I remain committed to the belief that theory matters most when it is accessible as a tool of transformation in people’s lives. This is most likely to be the case when theory is alive to the lived realities of those upon whose experiences it is based. Feminists have justifiably charged privacy with a number of offenses among the most serious of which is its role in shielding woman abuse from public scrutiny and serving as justification for state nonintervention in the private home to prevent and protect women from abuse. The subsequent blanket rejection of privacy that has followed this critique, however, is no answer to the problem of woman battering, nor does it reflect the lives of women who may require privacy to protect themselves from a battering partner. Despite the existing limits of our patriarchal society, feminist theory and practice must remain alive to privacy’s potential and work to reclaim and conscript privacy as a tool to be used in the fight against woman battering. When battered women, indeed when all women, can establish and defend boundaries in accordance with their needs and desires, privacy becomes a tool for empowerment, as opposed to an instrument of oppression.

Alternative is intersectional analysis that contests neoliberal ideology and advances social justice

Crenshaw 12 (Kimberle W. Crenshaw is Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law Schools; “SYMPOSIUM: OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED: WOMEN, RACE, AND CRIMINALIZATION: ARTICLE: From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, and Social Control”; August 2012; 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1418)//akim

Among the most robust connections between earlier contestations around violence against women and the contemporary rhetorics surrounding mass incarceration are the discursive elisions that have characterized antiracist and feminist approaches to both of these social problems. These elisions can be thought of as interconnected structures of argumentation that do more than marginalize certain women. In their mutual inattentiveness to the intersections of patriarchy and [*1451] racial power, feminist and antiracist rhetorics provide uncontested space for neoliberal ideology to gain traction not only within political culture more generally, but within the narrowed scope of social justice advocacy as well. Problems that were once debated within political discourse as the product of illegitimate social power are now less controversially seen as individual pathologies and cultural deficits. Consequentially, social problems that are disproportionately visited upon poor, racially marginalized communities have been framed in ways that prime relevant publics to accept surveillance and punishment as appropriate solutions. Social justice advocacy that posits the need for infrastructural development and social reform is increasingly superseded by market-based solutions predicated on punishment and reward. Though the tensions between broader social justice-oriented advocacy and the more individualistic thinking that underscores neoliberal approaches are not new, what does warrant greater attention is how the contemporary discourses associated with racial inequality and violence against women reflect a certain level of retrenchment within advocacy communities themselves. Thinking about these shifts through the lens of women of color reveals how some of the intersectional failures of feminism and antiracism have devolved into rhetorics and policies that reinforce rather than resist the politics of social punishment. As many commentators have argued, mass incarceration and its parallel and overlapping systems of surveillance and control have emerged in the face of political retreat on numerous social justice fronts. n107 The retrenchment politics that are now in play reflect a toxic interface between the twin dynamics of an increasingly interventionist set of punitive policies and a decreasing level of economic and political support for public institutions. n108 As these policies operate against a background structured by race, gender, and class hierarchies, inequalities that were once framed as forms of social injustice by feminist and antiracist advocates are increasingly [*1452] being represented in ways that deemphasize structural and historical causes and elevate individualistic causality along with simplistic stick-and-carrot solutions. The retrenchment that such ideological shifts help facilitate are not so much the spoils of active contestation between clearly defined political projects as they are the product of a gradual co-optation of how interventions will be framed and structured by neoliberal perspectives. Some of the discursive spaces most vulnerable to neoliberal occupation have been those where feminist and antiracist commitments have been weakened by their failures to address the intersectional dimensions of violence and social control. As a consequence, the marginalization of women and girls of color in many of these discourses is precisely where the neoliberal assault on the broader vision of social justice is particularly robust.

Framework

2NC – General

Epistemology of objectivity devalues non-masculine perspectives and constructs the reality that it claims to verify

Raigrodski 08 – Ph.D. and Assistant Director, University of Washington School of Law (Dana, “Reasonableness and Objectivtiy: A Feminist Discourse of the Fourth Amendment,” 17 Tex. J. Women & L. 153, Lexis)/SEP

Objectivity as epistemology defines both the process of observation or acquiring knowledge and the content of that knowledge and the world observed. As the traditionally superior methodology for acquiring knowledge, we have seen that the epistemology of objectivity erects distance and a-perspectivity as its methodological criteria. To perceive reality accurately, "one must be distant from what one is looking at and view it from no place and at no time in particular, hence from all places and times at once." n237 While the criteria of distance and a-perspectivity appear to be general ways of getting at reality rather than constructing it, they have specific social roots and implications. These include "devaluing as biased and unreliable the view from the inside and within the moment, and the perspective from the bottom of the social order." n238

The objectivist epistemology controls not only the form of knowing but also its content by defining how to proceed and the process of knowing, and by confining what is worth knowing. Objectivity defines the relevant world as that which can be objectively known. Hence, the epistemic question concerns the relation between knowledge (a replication or reflection of reality) and objective reality (that world which exists independent of any knower or vantage point). This objective reality is "independent of knowledge or the process of coming to know, and, in principle, knowable in full." n239

In light of our current gendered social hierarchies, the world which can be objectively known corresponds with men's reality. Since men control the world, they create the world from their own point of view, which then becomes the reality to be described. The male epistemological stance - objectivity - does not comprehend its own perspective and does not see that the way it apprehends its world is a form of its subjugation and presupposes it. What is objectively known corresponds to the world as men live it, and can thus be verified by being pointed to because the world [*194] itself is controlled from the same male point of view. n240

Feminist epistemology’s value of a multiplicity of perspectives is key to justice

Feminist epistemology values the multiplicity of perspectives and realities. It takes multiplicity to be constitutive of reality; it sees different perspectives as systematically related to each other and to other relations, such as exploited and exploiter; and it regards different perspectives as emergent and always changing. n348 Feminist legal scholars have developed several versions of such multi-perspectival jurisprudence, but one message, [*216] captured by Martha Minow, unites them: "Only through the variety of relationships constructed by many people seeing from different perspectives can truth be known and community be created." n349

Judges, lawyers, and police officers must rethink how we come to know what we know. Particularly within the context of the Fourth Amendment, we must contemplate how and what we know about harm and injurious behavior. We must be more attentive to the lives of other people and the forces they operate within. Moreover, we must learn to view the world from more than a single, reflexive position. Patricia Williams has described this practice as the "ambi-valent, multivalent way of seeing that is... at the heart of what is called critical theory, feminist theory, and the so-called minority critique." n350 It is the "fluid positioning that sees back and forth across boundary," n351 and which has been the "daily experience of people of color and of women." n352

Others advocate multiple consciousness as a jurisprudential method that ties together consciousness-shifting with a search for the pathway to a just world. In consciousness-shifting, Mari Matsuda refers to the ability to see that the law reflects a particular viewpoint, to operate within that view, and at the same time to shift out of it for purposes of critique, analysis, and strategy. n353 Such multiple consciousness is not a mere random ability to see all points of view, but a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed. We can all choose to know the concrete lived details of others by reading, studying, and listening. The jurisprudence of outsiders teaches us that these details and the emotions they evoke are important as we set out on the road to justice. n354

Epistemology and methodology shape legal knowledge production

Raigrodski 14 (Dr. Dana Raigrodski, , Lecturer and Director of the LL.M. Program and Executive Director of Global Affairs at the University of Washington School of Law, “What Can Comparative Legal Studies Learn from Feminist Legal Theories in the Era of Globalization?” University of Washington School of Law, Research Paper No. 2014-22, 43 Balt. L. Rev. 349-93, 2014)//AG