Legal fictions and bodily realities: privacy, personhood, and the fall of <i>Roe v. Wade</i>

This essay reframes the conventional narrative of Roe v. Wade as feminist triumph and Dobbs v. Jackson as its reversal. Drawing on Elizabeth Bell's extension of Victor Turner's social drama model, I position Roe and Dobbs as intensifying performances of patriarchal redress. Roe's feminist progress rested on a constitutional compromise rooted in an exclusionary privacy doctrine. Those rights were secured, and simultaneously rendered vulnerable, from the outset. Bringing performance studies’ attention to embodiment, power, crisis, and redress into conversation with constitutional law, the essay exposes the limits of liberal privacy jurisprudence and the ongoing precarity of reproductive and queer rights.