Conceive and Control

Some US federal laws uphold privacy rights while others permit widespread surveillance. Conceive and Control examines the contradiction between privacy and surveillance in everyday life and how that contradiction has become embedded in popular culture. Media studies scholar Emily Naser-Hall argues that cultural narratives about reproduction, domesticity, and national identity produced and were produced by legal rulings that restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. Beginning in the post-World War II era, Naser-Hall interrogates narratives of the right to privacy, sexuality, and reproduction in four defining Supreme Court cases. Alongside these cases, she analyzes works of literature and media that explore personal expressions of sexuality, domesticity, and bodily autonomy. For example, early privacy rulings limited protections to the marital home and constructed it as a place of safety and security, but horror films quickly emerged to question this narrative and portrayed terrors coming from inside the house. Assessing these phenomena alongside each other, Naser-Hall reveals how the law and media have influenced one another to create narratives that delimit notions of inside and outside, self and other, citizen and state, and public and private.