Liberal neutrality destabilizes as private domains become public political contestation.

Evidence

The multicultural question has also helped to deconstruct some of the other incoherences of the liberal constitutional state. The “neutrality” of the liberal state (i.e., the fact that it is represented as pursuing in the public realm no particular notion of “the good”) is said to secure the personal autonomy and liberty of the individual to pursue his or her own conception of “the good,” provided it is done in private. The ethically neutral legal order of the liberal state thus depends on the strict separation between the public and private spheres. But this is harder and harder to deliver in a stable form. The law and politics increasingly intervene in the so-called private realm. Private conduct and judgments intrude into the public realm. In the wake of the new feminism, we understand better how the sexual contract underpins the social contract. Domains like the family, sexuality, health, food, and dress, which used to belong quintessentially to the private domain have become part of an expanded public and political realm of contestation. The easy distinctions between the republic and the domestic spheres is no longer tenable, especially since the massive entry of women and the “privatized” activities which used to be associated with that sphere. Everywhere, “the personal” has become “the political.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 362

Categorization

• XREF: Explicitly links to the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ and to second-wave feminism’s critique of the public/private split — directly relevant to how racialized and gendered bodies are managed in the Islamophobia literature that builds on this.
• DEFINE: Defines the liberal constitutional state’s neutrality as resting on a public/private split that multicultural contestation exposes as untenable.