Dobbs before Dobbs: Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and the Public Rehearsal of Gendered Privacy

This thesis argues that a gendered double standard for privacy emerges during Clarence Thomas’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings — a logic Thomas and Kavanaugh later codify when limiting women’s reproductive rights in the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’ s Health Organization. While some critics have previously explored the way privacy operates in Thomas’s hearings, scholars have written far less about how the public and private spheres get invoked in Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Using critical discourse analysis, I examine Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s construction of privacy during both hearings, and investigate how Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s obfuscated rhetoric during their confirmation hearings WUSTL_OS_Contributor_License_Undergrad_20240722.docx Page 3 of 2 rehearsed the logic that they ultimately used to codify gendered privacy in Dobbs. In the wake of Dobbs, women face violations of sexual privacy, digital data privacy, and medical privacy, consequences that follow Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s strategic claims and evasions during their confirmation hearings. Highlighting the shifting gendered logics of privacy from performances during both confirmation hearings foregrounds Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s unsurprising decisions to ultimately revoke women’s right to privacy and autonomy in Dobbs.