social power structures thatWnd expression in the correlation of women with
the private and men with the public realm.
In response to this, it can be objected that MacKinnon fails to make
asuYciently clear distinction between a natural, pre-political, concept of
privacy (rejected equally by the radical egalitarian feminists and those who
see privacy as based in some way on the concept of freedom) and a legal-
conventional concept. With the help of the latter, both societies in general and
traditional conceptual divisions between the private and the public can be
criticized and revised. To renounce a concept of privacy that can prove crucial
to women in general and to the self-determination of the female sexual body
in particular seems an unnecessary step, if one can hold to a concept of
privacy that is not in the gender-speciWc, natural tradition, but is oriented
towards the notion of freedom.
3.3 The Theory of Power Critique
The third type of criticism of freedom-oriented theories of privacy com-
prises approaches from the perspective of the theory of power (for ex-
ample, Brown 1995 ; Cornell 1995 ). These criticize the liberal concepts of
freedom and autonomy on a more fundamental level. They are skeptical
of those who conceptualize privacy in relation to autonomy because and
insofar as this follows on from, and is consonant with, other (liberal)
dichotomies; and because dichotomies as such tend to be exclusionary and
to this extent repressive in nature. Furthermore, they argue, such concep-
tions fail to take into account—and suYciently criticize—the power struc-
tures inherent in society, because they focus too much on a male,
‘‘rational,’’ understanding of autonomy. These arguments are far from
homogeneous, ranging from those that appear to reject any conceptual-
ization of privacy (Brown 1995 ; and on diVerent grounds, Geuss 2002 )to
others that propose alternative ways of determining privacy. One example
of the latter is Morris ( 2000 , 330 ), who suggests that privacy should be
conceived as ‘‘intractable’’ and a ‘‘reprieve from scrutiny and public
judgment.’’ This third approach is particularly problematic when it
seems to oppose the very possibility of a normative conceptualization of
privacy. In Morris’s case, by contrast, it remains unclear why her position
is so incompatible with freedom-oriented approaches: the main diVerence
new ways of thinking about privacy 701