Inventing Privacy: Biopolitics of Race, Gender and Class in 19th century America

Abstract

The article using Michel Foucault’s concept of apparatus will examine the genealogical history of privacy. Privacy as a concept has been accorded universal status in the discourse of liberal subjectivity.  The article will examine how in the late nineteenth-century America, the apparatus of privacy engendered the discourse of privacy as a truth claim. Beneath the universality of privacy, there was a contested relationship between race, class, gender, and technology. Using different case studies, it will be argued that the apparatus of privacy was instrumental in constructing a white upper-class privileged discourse of privacy.