speciWcpractices also relevant to the community at large. Privacy must
accordingly be understood not as a realm to which the individual has
a claim qua autonomous being, but as one conceded to the individual as a
member of the community (Sandel 1982 ; Etzioni 1999 , 2004 ; Elshtain 1995 ).
The idea underlying this is that liberal theories of privacy conceive the self as
disembedded and egocentric in nature. This is said to be inconsistent in
epistemological terms, and normatively undesirable from a political perspec-
tive, for communities and communal practices always already have priority
over the formation of the individual identity. Accordingly, say communitar-
ians, privacy should not be primarily understood as an individual right to
(physical or sexual) self-determination, but as protection given to practices
that depend upon being sheltered from the view of others (Etzioni 1999 , 183 ;
2004 , 30 ).
This communitarian critique is not convincing, however, as a number of
authors have pointed out (Cohen 2002 , 42 ; Roessler 2004 , 98 ). It is a miscon-
ception to hold that a theory of privacy based upon the idea of individual
freedom and autonomy cannot at the same time also conceive of the self as
relational in nature and as constituted and contextualized in a variety of
respects (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000 ). It is, moreover, a politically troubling
misconception. Feminist theories of privacy, in particular, insist that individ-
ual rights come before communal duties, because otherwise it is impossible to
guaranteeequalfreedom to take decisions pertaining to one’s life and one’s
body. Communal practices and traditions may prove repressive and discrim-
inatory, making an individual right to privacy indispensable.
3.2 The Radical Egalitarian Feminist Critique
Radical egalitarian feminist approaches are on principle skeptical of any
conceptualization of privacy that represents privacy itself as emancipatory.
The best-known of these is that developed by MacKinnon ( 1987 ,93V; 1991 ;
Olsen 1991 ). For MacKinnon, the appeal to juridical or moral rights to privacy
is but a further manifestation of the attempt to push women back into an
ideologically constituted realm of privacy deWned as the non-political or pre-
political, and only ever concedes them rights insofar as they are seen as
diVerent or deviant. Such a concept of privacy, according to MacKinnon,
fails to call the sexual hierarchy into question. Instead, it simply preserves the
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