Reassembling Privacy: Vernacular Privacy in Law and The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

I offer a two part reading of how privacy is reassembled from the materials of law and literature: first, I trace the development of a vernacular notion of privacy in relation to an official history of privacy in order to clarify the somewhat contradictory relation of property to liberty within privacy doctrine. The association of privacy and property motivates feminist objection to privacy as a meaningful defence of reproductive rights, but the centrality of property to the development of privacy helps to explain the lively objects that animate the legal defence of things. Second, with a sketch of the official and unofficial meanings of privacy in place, I show how The Scarlet Letter helps to clarify the paradoxical meanings of privacy and to predict privacy's future as another name for liberty.