The regulation of intimate relationships has been a key battleground in
the culture wars of the past three decades. In this bold and innovative
book, Jean Cohen presents a new approach to regulating intimacy that
promises to defuse the tensions that have long sparked conflict among
legislators, jurists, activists, and scholars.
Disputes have typically arisen over questions that apparently set the
demands of personal autonomy, justice, and responsibility against each
other. Can law stay out of the bedroom without shielding oppression and
abuse? Can we protect the pursuit of personal happiness while requiring
people to behave responsibly toward others? Can regulation acknowledge a
variety of intimate relationships without privileging any? Must
regulating intimacy involve a clash between privacy and equality? Cohen
argues that these questions have been impossible to resolve because most
legislators, activists, and scholars have drawn on an anachronistic
conception of privacy, one founded on the idea that privacy involves
secrecy and entails a sphere free from legal regulation. In response,
Cohen draws on Habermas and other European thinkers to present a robust
"constructivist" defense of privacy, one based on the idea that norms
and rights are legally constructed.
Cohen roots her arguments in debates over three particularly contentious
issues: reproductive rights, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment.
She shows how a new legal framework, "reflexive law," allows us to build
on constructivist insights to approach these debates free from the
liberal and welfarist paradigms that usually structure our legal
thought. This new legal paradigm finally allows us to dissolve the
tensions among autonomy, equality, and community that have beset us. A
synthesis of feminist theory, political theory, constitutional
jurisprudence, and cutting-edge research in the sociology of law, this
powerful work will reshape not only legal and political debates, but how
we think about the intimate relationships at the core of our own lives.
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