Poverty of Privacy Rights

Khiara M. Bridges is Professor of Law and of Anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011).

"The Poverty of Privacy Rights pushes the conceptualization of legal rights into a new and useful direction, establishing a sturdy platform for intelligent advocacy on behalf of poor people and their dignity. Khiara Bridges' deep knowledge of the social welfare and healthcare system, and the conversations her book invites will bring more privacy concerns affecting the poor to the forefront."—Anita Allen, University of Pennsylvania "The Poverty of Privacy Rights is a provocative, courageous account of poor women's lives and the American healthcare system. One of the brightest stars of her generation, Khiara Bridges pushes against the traditional framings of sex-based privacy erosion to deftly articulate an urgent contemporary social concern—privacy rights filtered, constrained, and tampered by government. Bridges masterfully argues that to be poor in the United States and dependent on governmental assistance is to experience intrusions and violations of constitutional rights unrivaled by all others."—Michele Goodwin, University of California, Irvine "In The Poverty of Privacy Rights, Khiara Bridges presents an eloquent treatise detailing why Anthropology Matters! She artfully unravels the inevitable contradictions that stem from the aims of poverty policies in the United States between lowincome mothers who experience the policies in their use of social services and those who interpret policies and thereby provide access to or sanctions against services....As anthropologists, we have a responsibility and a platform to engage in moral and ethical knowledge making of the kind documented in Bridges's The Poverty of Privacy Rights. Readers interested in the anthropology of law, public policy, and poverty studies would greatly benefit from this manuscript."—Sherri Lawson Clark, American Anthropologist "For those who hold dear, however naively, the idea that the proper application of constitutional law itself can create justice, Khiara Bridges's The Poverty of Privacy Rights is a devastating read....[Her] arguments are elegantly presented, thoroughly documented, and persuasive, and there is no doubt that any future work in this area will have to begin by citing this book."—Wendy A. Bach, Review of Politics

• Introduction1. The Moral Construction of Poverty2. The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine: Revealing, Yet Misleading3. Family Privacy4. Informational Privacy5. Reproductive PrivacyConclusion