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The debt crisis in Latin America threatened the solvency of major American banks. The United States intervened, both directly and via multilateral organizations in which the United States was a dominant force, to ensure that Latin American countries paid back their debts to US banks. The crisis also provided an occasion to further open up Latin American economies to US goods and capital. While the avowed goal of structural reform in Latin America was to promote development, it is more likely that US decision-makers understood, or at least had an inkling, that policies associated with the Washington Consensus would hurt economic growth in Latin America but still pushed them because they served American economic interests. As we have seen, the US intervention in Latin America during the 1980s was part of a long pattern of soft economic imperialism (discussed in earlier chapters under the rubric of informal empire) to forcibly open doors the world over to sustain and enhance American prosperity. Economic motives were also behind the US military intervention in Iraq, but in less obvious ways than in Latin America. Among the factors that make the Middle East of great strategic importance to the United States is the concentration of world’s oil resources in the region. Whether friends or foes control the production, distribution, and pricing of oil is, then, a matter of considerable US concern. As noted in chapter 5, the US was party to the overthrow of Muhammed Mossadegh in the 1950s in order to deny Iran national control over its own oil. The client status of the Saudi monarchy serves American regional interests well. Ever since the overthrow of the pro-American Shah, the US has sought to deny Iran a significant regional role. It even supported Saddam Hussein against Iran during the prolonged Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. No one doubts that the US intervened to liberate Kuwait from Iraq in 1991 because Kuwait swims in oil. The motives behind the Second Iraq War—the focus of the present chapter—need to be understood within this historical and regional context. I argue that the United States went to war in Iraq the second time as a first step in a grander design to further incorporate the oil-rich Middle East within the American orbit. The fact that it may not work out that way does not take anything away from the original motives. Intervention in Iraq also fits a century-long pattern of hard military imperialism: the pattern began with the United States’ smashing Filipino nationalists at the turn of the twentieth century to control the Philippines as a stepping-stone to the giant China market; it continued in Vietnam as a way to stop the spread of communism and to maintain open economies in the region; and is now playing itself out in the oil-rich Middle East that the United States hopes to dominate. Judged from the standpoint of whether America’s imperial interventions bring it benefits, the evidence from the most recent period again suggests that the United States does economic imperialism better than military imperialism. The US efforts to deal with the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s supports the first part of this conclusion. As we have seen, the United States used economic coercion to ensure cooperation by Latin American elites, who were willing to pass on the costs of policy reform to both the lower strata and the future generations of Latin America. The costs of American intervention to Americans were minimal, except for the loss of some international goodwill. In turn, the US government and US-dominated multilateral institutions helped to maintain the profits and solvency of major American banks. Latin American markets were opened up further to American goods and capital. By contrast, US-military intervention in Iraq has cost the Americans dearly and the rewards remain uncertain. Since the goals of US intervention were murky to begin with, it is difficult to assess whether any of them have been met or are likely to be met. If the goals had been minimal—namely, to get rid of a thuggish, possibly anti-American dictator with access to oil wealth—that much the Iraq War certainly achieved. However, much of this goal was already accomplished after the first Gulf War, after which Saddam was still in power but well contained, and even willing to allow foreign oil companies to invest in Iraqi oil. The grander goal of remaking Iraq in America’s image, and then going beyond to impose an American peace on the entire region, remains, at best, illusive, and more likely, with growing anti-Americanism and the spread of militancy, even more distant than before the second war. The impact of American interventions on developing countries—both economic and military—has been negative. As to economic imperialism, I document below that American efforts to ensure that banks were repaid their debts contributed to a lost decade of growth in Latin America. Beyond the lost decade, moreover, forced economic openness reinforced economic dependency of Latin American countries on their northern giant. The consequences are evident if one juxtaposes the experience of Asian countries during the same period (say, from 1980 to 2005), with that of Latin America. Asian countries pursued a more autonomous development path in which national states directed their respective economies. This pattern of development—the Asian financial crisis notwithstanding—produced high growth rates, modest inequalities, industrial development, and high value-added exports. By contrast, economic growth in Latin American countries remained sluggish, with sharp income inequalities. Most Latin American countries also continued to export commodities in exchange for manufactured goods. The negative impact of America’s war in Iraq is there for anyone to see. What makes a moral judgment a little complicated is the fact that Saddam Hussein was a despotic, ruthless dictator who killed many of his own citizens, probably close to a quarter million over a period of twenty-five years.2 By contrast, as noted, nearly a half million Iraqis died under American occupation between 2003 and 2011, the year most American troops left Iraq. Since then, US troops have had to return to deal with militancy. The Iraqi state remains weak and corruption and poverty remain endemic, even as oil extraction continues to grow.

When colonized countries shrugged off the yoke of colonialism after World War II, they found themselves ensnared in neocolonial arrangements that perpetuated their impoverishment and underdevelopment. The Cold War realignment of the world system dominated by the United States and its First World allies on the one hand, and the former Soviet Union and its allies on the other, produced the Third World, that is, countries caught in the crosshairs of the battle between the two camps. Concomitantly, colonial narratives of the inferiority of colonized people, their cultures, and their knowledge systems (i.e., science) evolved into Cold War narratives of modernization and development that presumed the racial and / or cultural deficiency of the Third World. These narratives promoted the ideology that the plight of the Third World was the product of internal deficiencies rather than ongoing colonial exploitation. The solution laid out in these narratives was for Third World scientists to follow a Western path reliant on advanced industrial technologies to prosper (Philip 2015; Bhuiyan 2008; Escobar 1995). Even though the article invoked the notion of “western experience” as the path to Third World advancement, careful attention to what the article denoted by “western experience” in the sentence that followed—Taha knew where the West housed its anthrax—reveals that “western experience” is quite overstated. Such a gloss reflects a deeply entrenched subtext—the assumption of Western superiority. It is a notion so taken for granted that the article need not even explicitly reference it—a vague gesture to “western experience” suffices. The quote also intimates that Iraqi acquisition of “western experience” poses a threat—it is linked to Iraqi superweapons. The end of the Cold War and the advent of U.S.-led global capitalism had produced a severe power asymmetry wherein the United States turned to subduing what were significantly smaller threats globally. Yet, U.S. national circles became concerned with these smaller threats in the backdrop of the vast interconnectedness and mobility wrought by global capitalism, which had made both weaponry and advanced technologies much more accessible to even the most disempowered nations and groups (Cecire 2009). Iraqi scientists like Taha embodied this threat to U.S. hegemony—she had accessed Western technology and could now use it against the United States. One Department of Defense–affiliated study on Taha from 1999 (Taha had been the subject of UK and U.S. surveillance since the mid1990s) quoted Andrew Koch, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington: “It is the scientists who are the key to this [weapons capacity].… As long as Iraq maintains the brainpower to do this … over the long term you can’t stop them” (Brian Anderson 1999, 21; emphasis added). As with the news quote above, connections with the West were depicted as a source of intellectual (and technological) power, leading to the image of Western-educated Iraqis who were both advanced and potentially dangerous. In suggesting that “western experience” and technologies can be dangerous in the hands of the non-Western Other, these quotes intimate an ambivalence toward educating and equipping Iraqis. This logic reflected the underlying reality of U.S. empire—that the United States had less of a problem with Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction (as the United States had after all helped develop and furnish these weapons to Iraq while it was an ally),27 and more of a problem with Iraqi ability to use them without direction from the United States or, worse, against the United States.

If wage labour was a condition for productive labour during the nineteenth century, in the twenty-first century, wage-less-labour has become an increasingly important source of the production of surplus labour (see infra). As in contemporary capitalism, reproduction of living labour depends not only on the aggregate value of rent, water, and food (as a gross simplification of nineteenth-century conditions) but also on a greater level of social relations among economic and extra-economic activities, resulting in a more heterogeneous labour-value to be reproduced. Examples of this are the consumption level of mass-consumer goods, entertainment, and drugs, the constant replacement of planned-obsolescent goods, the necessary access to social digital relations with friends, family, work, and the state, etc., by means of combined hardware-software commodities. Therefore, as social subsistence becomes more complex, many vital activities which are imposed occur outside wage labour relations; nevertheless, they remain subsumed under the economic imperatives of capitalism. The socially necessary labour-time, which is essential for the reproduction of the labour-force, is now divided among many contractual relationships. While the first appears to be the one imposed by wage labour, all access to the digital world entails contractual relations that the user—now a prosumer, a creator of surplus-value in the digital realm (see infra)—must subdue to participate in the digital social life.

While the notion of the social contract represents an idealist theoretical notion, in the digital sphere, one-sided contracts are imposed as an existential condition for the individual’s digital actualisation. “And the development of this material wealth therefore in opposition to, and at the expense of, the human individual. Productivity of labour in general = maximum of product with minimum of labour, therefore as much as possible the improvement of commodities” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Digital commodification and productive labour thus appear as the summit of productive labour, namely, labour which produces surplus-value. The purpose of the capitalist mode of production is that “the individual product, etc., contain as much unpaid labour as possible, and that this is only achieved by production for the sake of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Marx leaves no room for doubt. The capitalist mode of production presupposes the production of surplus-value because it is its primary and highest goal; productive labour is subordinated to the production of surplus-value, “thus only the labour which is directly consumed in the process of production for the utilisation of capital” (Marx, 1988, p. 108).

According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a not inconsiderable portion of the US-American economy revolves around intellectual property(private), representing 7.8 trillion dollars of the 2019 GDP (Toole et al., 2022, p. 3). According to the study, US-American industries accounted for 41% of the economic endeavours and comprised 63 million or 44% labour positions. “Output in the IP-intensive industries grew at roughly the same rate as the entire domestic economy during the previous five years, with the exception of the copyright-intensive industries, where output grew at a faster rate than the domestic economy” (Toole et al., 2022, p. iii). The report also shows a distribution of industrial sectors which are intellectual property(private)-intensive: manufacturing; wholesale and retail trade; information; finance, insurance, real estate, and leasing; technical, management and administrative professional services; education and health care services; and arts, entertainment and recreation (Toole et al., 2022, p. 6). Still from the USPTO, a 2022 economic note states: “In 2019, of the 103 industries identified as commodity-exporting industries, 76 were IP-intensive. These 76 industries accounted for $1.31 trillion or 79% of all U.S. commodity exports in 2019. In fact, 18 “of the 20 top exporting industries were found to intensively use intellectual property” (‘Exports and Imports by U.S. IP-Intensive Industries’, 2022). Therefore, it is fundamental to recognise that societies are undergoing at least a phenomenological change in social property relations. However, how much and in which ways does this transformation impact social relations? Which existential conditions remain the same, which are metamorphosing, and which are being dissolved?”

The ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) “revolution” is catalysing this process, and these questions can no longer be avoided. With AI making many wage labour positions redundant, with science being generally applied to production, social relations based on private property attain a qualitative new paradoxical paradigm.1 Private appropriation constantly denotes an anachronic social condition, and power relations lose their ontological determinations. The contradiction between social production and private appropriation becomes so accentuated that complementary power and coercion systems must be implemented to sustain the capitalist mode of production. Going beyond such social arrangements based on domination is hence not only a utopia but also a necessary condition. Forcing old structures with no ontological basis upon collective social life produces enormous social tensions, which emerge in different forms. While knowledge and material productions in the twenty-first century epitomise previously unimaginable degrees of development, which could render starvation, poverty, most diseases, conflicts and wars over resources, economic competition, and social control all things of the past, capitalism not only sustains but intensifies the plethora of existing tensions.

Dr. Anjali Vats will deliver a talk to the Department of Communication Studies on December 1, from 4:15-5:30, in Commons Center 235. Vats’s talk, “Owning Your Masters (Taylor’s Version): Postfeminist Tactical Copyright and the Erasure of Black Intellectual Labor,” considers Taylor Swift’s decision to rerecord her master records, beginning with the acclaimed Fearless and Red, in the larger context of Black musicians’ struggles to own and exploit their creative works. It develops the concept of postfeminist tactical copyright to interrogate how, despite Swift’s success in reclaiming her intellectual property rights and resisting white patriarchal oppression, her white feminine privilege results in the minimization and erasure of decades of Black intellectual labor, including by many Black women. Taking an intersectional approach to reading her situation reveals that she was able to succeed because 1) of the efforts of Black artists that preceded her, 2) the composition/recording distinction enshrined in the Sound Recording Act of 1971, and 3) Swift’s postfeminist self-styling as an innocent, wholesome, and resilient but flawed all-American singer-songwriter who is a skilled entrepreneur. Vats trace these arguments through the history of master records, implications of copyright law, and, finally, Swift’s tactical postfeminist performances.

(Greta, professor at University of Wisconsin – River Falls, teaches Literature of Environmental Justice, Green Business Writing, US Environmental Lit, Human-Animal Studies, Women’s Lit, LGBTQ Lit – BA from Pepperdine University, MA from Claremont Graduate School, PhD from University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, “Ecofeminism and climate change”, https://pdf-sciencedirectassets-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/271772/1-s2.0-S0277539515X00021/1-s2.0-S0277539515000321/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEBoaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJIMEYCIQC2eaNmtMxfQTTpwu1CUlxIC6YzgkGzytWa2GR%2BdrdP1QIhALo8deNDxUfgSOy9QJWoUSznDnoi18wRIP%2BYf6EZ0fmFKrwFCPP%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEQBRoMMDU5MDAzNTQ2ODY1Igw69Qd2JEJCok447kMqkAVC7HLGUL5J%2FooMYAiDOJPDpA5yj%2B40%2Bl1Lg38VwFIfw7Um8dvIoEXb2g5GpWlvd5Q%2BHuldOgivToLX7Nn2hvSL6RZCDfw1ZWv8th9nZI5BPl%2FPPa%2FQ%2B9nZo%2BJnl2ykt5%2BeO9V%2BLX85KBzWLkQ89h%2FQs0MJWMwx9%2FRyaUQfJAX6LWVIRwS6DWk1pWDZKoy4MyThb8aG000BpKzPTmBsa0h%2FZo2q5xk4OhyXKbhrPe6OlRxqIXN0gLtFxk12tKUKjxm7tu4raXloD5Ei4b5H2AJDW3aPvk%2FDc1SpVRmeRoo665Ij3x7Ff6q96UQesShNxJV0vOqjamogo%2BOJ8adXFWyAwxvHXO1iP7gWsdw6QNUQjIoQmEpgaCfqFwwoYGL8NrIrDLkDpMxr5OD4q%2B8Gl2iabV55oq6s2mCUtWv1XDaeL4P%2F84rY5ltkXaDzPMg2pP4Lp1R4Fczy6sxaJUG2dWuHnbnCN8yJICiNCXN%2B6rE5R91wuyNhiNIZxfNbVzyDYI9BQsKOikyrAXA9JyUfX0TvloUdSdslZO6M%2B6y43%2F8TStIpWO6k7S64wgsjoC5H9%2BBQIX%2BkP6AHU8G3aeKo5xjpIDvcP%2BR9Cu1N792xhnsIwURh4EbdubquDt%2Bd1XZ3T5uPm3QCGQYdB7IZRkKpwk%2FSIgMRwocG6oPJTn8%2FLYUBF38699fS82IDw870lt8ANyHhMxhE8mLEi5o0U8Ejf9yzuEEqCHPX8H%2ByOFRiYEShFMqEeMFch%2BXwk7nF2ssVgvdbr0RTnnaboXX79O3RhBVU%2FS%2BFlFfqFh0P56rNL8F0gofkfQvSiPVZvMJTwDoA451WVV84QScXmWWA6DHU6yb0LtmG23gzOiFc4PRSj1dlWzC245S1BjqwASUEY5qnKQCTKQ0FXxgCudOVnAC8QVU%2FwC6CMOL1zIj2YryxZLRJefyN5MLthJQv0ZYQBp2CpOgc26iOQWVrIRUL1KgtJSjTr%2FIL7HAhE4fOcq8XaYSmhxe0%2BKVghq%2FTcG0WhcWDyfnJwFD1oNRNvS%2BejIHHzfxPqh6EP4e7qtHFcF5Hw0YanQK1Bk2OTkHdqxwPVHzeHydfUdksIO58nw5DgEKGl%2Bg%2FFPFrmZUHwdNJ&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20240727T175557Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTY2AJTLG5L%2F20240727%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=3e6a5848e93a74397e85b0020cfe3587bf446a3d165634921f8cac94c6410cda&hash=8c54cc764304165084e87faa5bc7bd7d6d4d33eb886e7a4522bd9ee2c191528e&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0277539515000321&tid=spdf-de79c86e-5d5a-49a6-8dc1-b0e9a233d81f&sid=d66ff11f9be56944ef192ba26e440079891dgxrqa&type=client&tsoh=d3d3LXNjaWVuY2VkaXJlY3QtY29tLnByb3h5LmxpYi51bWljaC5lZHU%3D&ua=131c5e0659005e51045d&rr=8a9e80d8cf60aa30&cc=us&kca=eyJrZXkiOiIzdFFnYWZZZ0haRi9TZUlZUkNUKzNwU3FlSGNWcHVDeTlZbTdUcWxNSWtYTlhlaVY5VHhCY0RaQ3dpeWN3a3lPOVowbkZ2QU03MDEyNmJ6Y3poVDFqbzExdkkxK2FieS90RGRvd2x0eThDNUlRRnUvSmt2bXBVenFtZVdJaTdlWjg2cEJhbGhCc0svV1ZhN3Y3TmpTUGxaRGJMVWQ2Q0FnNlBmVFd5MmZyRW51d2Q1TSIsIml2IjoiZDgzNmY4ZDY0NThkYzc2YzU1ZTYzMzg1ZTBhNzI0OTQifQ==_1722102962372) (sorry for the link font size, it’s super long!) //GB <3

Make no mistake: women are indeed the ones most severely affected by climate change and natural disasters, but their vulnerability is not innate; rather it is a result of inequities produced through gendered social roles, discrimination, and poverty. According to CARE, an international NGO, women work 2/3 of the world's working hours, produce half the world's food, and earn 10% of the world's income; of the world's one billion poorest people, women and girls make up 70%.4 If there were an unimpeded correlation between hard work and earnings, women would be the world's highest earners. Instead, structural barriers of gender put women—and children—among the world's poorest people, situated on the front lines of climate change. Around the world, gender roles restrict women's mobility, impose tasks associated with food production and caregiving, and simultaneously obstruct women from participating in decision-making about climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and decisions about adaptation and mitigation. In developing countries, women living in poverty bear the burden of climate change consequences, as these create more work to fetch water, or to collect fuel and fodder—duties traditionally assigned to women. When households experience food shortages, which occur regularly and may become more frequent due to climate change, women are the first to go without food so that children and men may eat. As rural areas experience desertification, decreased food production, and other economic and ecological hardships, these factors prompt increased male out-migration to urban centers with the promise of economic gain and wages returned to the family; these promises are not always fulfilled. In the short-term, and possibly long-term as well, male out-migration means more women are left behind with additional agricultural and household duties, such as caregiving. These women have even fewer resources to cope with seasonal and episodic weather and natural disasters.

Feminism is changing our perception of the world and this is a revolution. A bloodless and profoundly transformational revolution, because it involves individual and collective daily life. Communication is one of the most important, influential tools available for spreading and consolidating this process of change, and doing so through feminist journalism plays an essential role. Mainstreaming the gender perspective in our professional practice not only allows us to fulfil our profession’s objectives in terms of quality, but also meet society’s demands for this revolutionary process. We do this as a declaration of principles, without hiding behind concepts of neutral or objective journalism (which we know do not exist), but also flying the flag for critical, quality journalism, dignified journalism that favours diversity, the common good and in defence of human rights.

Journalism is a profession that can transform society and guarantee the foundations for a plural, free, conscious and egalitarian world, while ensuring vital collaboration from a critical public. Feminist journalism helps generate critical thought that can rectify gender inequalities and help us question reality, which until now has been seen as a single truth imposed by androcentric power. Such a perspective enables us to disseminate information that is diverse, true and verified, to explain what is happening and in doing so, provide the keys and tools for everyone to understand and, if they wish, question what we publish. Such journalism is not just a political option, which of course it is, but also a means of meeting social demands for a change of approach, whereby information is innovative, diverse, bold, critical and analytical. Information that does not ignore half the population, women, or the diversity and richness provided by other identities and realities that are hidden in ‘official’ journalism. As Rita Segato states in her book La guerra contra las mujeres, the deconstruction of misogyny that minimises discriminations and violence against women, will not only lead us to “understand what is happening to us as women and everyone in the position of women, dissidents or the ‘other’ under the patriarchy, but also understand what is happening throughout society as a whole”.

More than ever, expert feminist-focused reporting is the essential antidote.   

With the announcement last week about the closure of the website Jezebel, laments about the past, present and future of feminist-focused news reporting and perspective ricocheted across the Internet. The Guardian columnist Moira Donegan zeroed in on the power of community fostered by feminist media, deeming it “more essential than ever in our current moment of abortion bans and anti-feminist backlash.”

Such indictment of gendering in science bears directly on the question of gender in patents, not only as a general critique of objectivity, but also as an indicator of how objectivity may be operating within patent law. If objectivity in science leads to an inaccurate account of the world, if it masks the relationships and interactions that lead to scientific discovery and innovation, and most of all, if it fosters a hierarchy that excludes valuable forms of participation in order to shore up the privileges of a few, then it may be doing the same in patent law. Patent law explicitly draws its legal standards from scientific research and technological development; the PHOSITA standard contemplates a level of skill in the art, that is, in a particular field of technological expertise. If we were to amend the patent system to address the potential bias of objective standards in science and in law, the results for patent law could run the gamut from subtle to profound, depending upon whether we ascribe to feminist empiricist, standpoint, or postmodern critiques. It is to that potential range of reform that we now turn.

A few weeks ago I put my foot tenderly into the minefield of feminism, arguing in a blog “What Does Feminism have to with Copyright in Canada”, that statements made by Carys Craig, a law professor at York University to the effect that robust copyright protections were anti-feminist were off base. My argument was that copyright laws, unlike law in some other areas, is gender-blind and in fact copyright has been an important factor in strengthening protection and welfare for all creators, both male and female. To ensure my message got out, I tweeted it as well as posting it on my blog.

Perhaps not surprisingly this set off a twitter-storm of comment from several prominent feminists. Dr. Craig took me to task for “explaining” (she didn’t say “mansplaining” but that is the way I read it) to her “and others on the ‘feminist policy bandwagon’ that copyright is ‘totally gender blind’, so not an area of bias and discrimination; and (that) barriers to education, tech change and creativity are not feminist issues”. Indeed I did claim (does arguing a position amount to “explaining”?) that copyright is gender blind and thus should not be a target of feminists, but I did not say that education, tech change and creativity are not feminist issues. Of course they are. It’s just that these issues should not be conflated with copyright. As for the “feminist policy bandwagon”, what I actually said was that the Trudeau government had such a bandwagon that Dr. Craig and other anti-copyright activists were attempting to climb aboard

OVERVIEW This research explores the participation of women in the copyright system by providing key metrics on women authors in copyright registrations, and evaluating registration rates in the broader context of women in copyright related occupations. A combination of copyright registration records and publically available records was analyzed to explore these relationships.

KEY FINDINGS

Women and other marginalized groups in society experience and use the cyberspace differently. They are often disproportionately harmed by cyber threats and encounter additional, gendered forms of cyberviolence. Digital technologies can carry existing gender norms and gendered systems of oppression and abuse from the offline world into digital spaces.13 They can aggravate and aggregate existing forms of threat and abuse, even create entirely new ones,14 and carry offline consequences for women, creating a continuum of gendered violence.15 Additionally, already vulnerable groups often face barriers or further risks when accessing or applying cybersecurity mechanisms. While the experience of cyber threats and cybersecurity interventions can be different based on gender, this difference is not commonly represented in the policies and practices around cybersecurity.16 To address this, cybersecurity threat assessments should consider how traditional cybersecurity threats, such as attacks on critical infrastructure, have gendered impacts but also emphasize non-traditional cybersecurity threats that disproportionally affect women and women’s rights organizations. Such threats that have traditionally been underrepresented in cybersecurity policy fora, on the multilateral as well as regional and national levels, but that are particularly relevant from a gender perspective are online gender-based violence (GBV), surveillance and privacy violations, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQI+ radicalization and mobilization online, as well as gendered aspects of cybercrime such as human trafficking online. Women are more often or more severely affected by digital violence in the form of harassment, surveillance and violations of privacy, doxing, cyber-stalking, disinformation, and the spread of fake news and false information about individuals, as well as non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and unauthorized pornography.17 Other cyber threats recognized by conventional understandings of cybersecurity, and are not gendered in their origin, still carry differentiated gendered impacts. For example, internet shutdowns like the 2016 Russian shutdown of the internet in Crimea or shutdowns resulting from 2016 cyber attacks in Libya, did not target women specifically. However, they caused women to lose their means of external communication and access to critical information, crucial tools to ensure their personal safety outside the home, platforms for informal work and e-commerce with detriments for their economic well-being, and access to other online services such as education.26 Data breaches may also carry differentiated gendered impacts – for example, in cases where breaches of medical data exposed the personal information of medical professionals providing reproductive services and care, and of the patients receiving them.

When the recession hit in 2007 women took the devastating period as an opportunity to provide for their families while following their passions. Along with increase in female business owners came an increase in registered trademarks owned by women. The National Women’s Business Council commissioned a study in 2012 concerning women business owners and intellectual property, which produced promising results.

According to the study, the number of women who successfully applied for trademark registration has doubled since 1980. While women once owned less than 17% of registered trademarks that number has increased to 33%. These entrepreneurs have overcome the obstacles that impeded other women from protecting their brands. Registration for female business owners is dominated in the fields of education, business/advertising, clothing, entertainment and miscellaneous science and technology.

In many parts of the world, women are not treated equal to men under the law. From owning land to obtaining inheritance, women are at a disadvantage. Stronger intellectual property protections can help alleviate this discrepancy. When IP rights are strongly protected, the rights of women are protected as well. For example, the countries with the strongest protection of copyrights also tend to have the highest paid actresses and female artists.

April 26 is commemorated as World IP Day by WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization. Celebrated internationally, the goal of World IP Day is to promote knowledge about intellectual property (patents, copyright, trademarks) and their role in promoting innovation and creativity. This year, World IP Day’s theme “Powering change: Women in innovation and creativity” will celebrate women and their role in shaping the future of society.

In various countries, including the United States, many small businesses are run by women.1 In developing countries, such as Ghana, these female entrepreneurs sell a range of items, from arts and crafts to cell phones. The “market women” hustle to sell their fruits, vegetables, and other wares to support their children and families. Many of these women are not aware of how intellectual property (IP) laws can help them gain strategic advantages in the marketplace. They may not, for example, develop their brand by using trademarks to distinguish their businesses from those of competitors. They may also be unaware that their innovations and creative works may be protected by copyrights or patents. IP rights can help these female entrepreneurs to increase economic opportunities and to promote their human development.2 Women, especially those who are elderly or who are the sole adult income earner in their household, are more likely to live in poverty.3 IP laws can be used as a tool for promoting human flourishing and human development if entrepreneurial women can better use IP rights to advance and promote their small enterprises.

Intellectual property is relevant to human development in the United States and other industrialized countries. However, the potential for IP law to promote human development in developing countries is even greater. This is because the use of IP rights is much more limited in those nations. This article will, therefore, discuss the use of IP law to promote the human flourishing of female entrepreneurs and “market women” in developing countries.

The limits of the cyborg and the human The cyborg does not come without baggage, and in fact comes with its own value codes, which is perhaps amplified by our increasingly data-driven society that is run by algorithms and other agents that exist in technological infrastructures. Atanasoski and Vora discuss in their essay how these technological, networked infrastructures have begun to bring into question not even who counts as cyborg, but who and what even qualifies as human (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015). Their essay illustrates the limits of posthumanist fantasies of surpassing the boundaries of humanity, and how the views of this techno utopia formulate the ‘surrogate human’. Further, the fantasy that humans can be freed by technology from labor has perhaps collapsed in the age of the networked society, and although surrogate humanity may mark a shift away from capitalism, ‘it does so by reaffirming existing paradigms of racialized and gendered value through the figure of a surrogate human who performs degraded work that is always already meant to be invisible’, (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 7). Although not dealing with the concept of cyborg per se, this essay marks the introduction of the concept of the transhuman, the posthuman, and the surrogate human that technology has promised to create – and its failures to transcend identity in the form of gender, race, class, and ability, and rather continues to function and uphold in a colonialist, historical, capitalist power structure. Technology, the Internet of Things, data, and algorithms that enable the structure of modern day society are never neutral, and in fact all of these data-driven practices further ‘materializes assumptions of what constitutes a human . . .’ (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 13). ‘Techno-utopics surrounding big data, smart objects, and internetworking of humans and machines, however, do not dwell in the vitality of matter, but rather propose the thing as a surrogate human. In this way, they replicate the violent neoliberal impetus to enfold difference into sameness – into a shared space and time’, (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 16). However as Holland notes in their work The Erotic Life of Racism, there are beings that exist in time (white people) and beings who exist in space (Black people) – and when these two beings collide, there is an affront to the material and societal order within which they exist. The idea of technology, the cyborg, the transhuman and the posthuman as identities that exist in a utopia, in a beyond, is a myth that is being perpetuated and shifted by those who already benefit from hegemonic paradigms of what counts as being human in the first place. Bhattarai’s essay then further illustrates these concepts in their essay discussing algorithmic value, and how even investments in algorithms that seem benign are in fact reproducing a certain cultural logic of power in terms of knowledge, labor, and bodies (Bhattarai, 2017). The idea of source code, of algorithms, of data being the genesis of action is naïve – ‘because their agency is enabled and constrained by a larger network of cultural and economic encodings that render them executable’, (Bhattarai, 2017: 21), illuminating again that attempts to make technology and the tech world more inclusive and diverse as well as the attempts to use the category of cyborg as transcending difference are merely the master’s tools disguised as revolutionary action. Technology (and thus, cyborgs), since it is created by humans, carries with it the same limitations as humanity in terms of its ability to provide transcendence of our categorizations of race, class, gender, and ability. In effect, the ‘source code’ is already imbued with certain assumptions of all of these categories of difference, since it is written from the epistemological standpoint and values of those who create it (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). If the tech industry and tech world is heavily dominated by whiteness, by maleness, then in what capacity do those who do not fit into hegemonic notions of humanity (white, cis, hetero, male) figure into these infrastructural equations? Epistemic sites of thought in the theorization of the transhuman, of the posthuman, of the cyborg all exist within the same epistemic paradigms upon which all science and technology are built upon – colonialist, Western, white – and thus are limited in fully conceptualizing a beyond.

Hypersexual Women on the Cutting Edge of Technology Sex hacking is important to reposition our thoughts about the ways hacking is already sexualized. For instance, Black female bodies are historically deemed as hypersexual and sexually available for illicit public consumption since the days of slavery, but Mireille Miller-Young’s (2010) work on Black women and pornography speaks to how women of color can face multiple axes of harm and discrimination in the digital domain but can enjoy the mobility that comes with the territory. While one cannot make the total leap of analogizing sex hackers to sex workers, the fact that pornography is a primary arena for Asian female digital visibility points to the similarities as well as differences with other women of color. Hacking the Black/White binary thus entails further hacking of the male/female binary and the normative/hypersexual binary. The online adult entertainment industry leads the way in marketing to niche audiences. For identity groups with online websites, they are disproportionately targeted by the most-sophisticated purveyors of smut. Asian Americans and women’s organization are often the “victims” of this legal form of identity theft, which diverts traffic from their legitimate websites that contain the words “Asian” or “women” channeling them to X-rated copycat domains or websites that promote “Yellow Fever” stereotypes about Asian prostitutes and mail order brides; thus, turning the products of niche ethnic media markets into “hotly desired, packageable ethnic fetish products” (Ikeda 2012). Using tools like Overture, the batches of information related to searches for “AsianWeek” are hijacked, poached, and rerouted (e.g., ARP spoofing) to Asianphile adult sites like “Mrchewsasianbeaver.com,” which offers the best in “hottest” Far East women you can find (ibid). Such websites reinforce the archetype of Asian women as passive hypersexualized subjects of the Net, rather than game-changers of the World Wide Web. In thinking about sex hacking the binary, I want to place my discussion in the larger feminist scholarship on hypersexualization, focusing on the ways binaries are differentially deployed for specific groups. To explicate my utilization of hacking through a gendered and sexualized lens, I draw on Linh Nguyen Tu’s (2003) work on the hypersexualization Asian women in cyberspace as an important site for engaging a politics of representation and difference not catering to dualities of top/bottom, inside/outside, and self/other. Like Juana Juana María Rodriguez’s work on Latina discursive spaces and cyberspaces, Tu’s research recognizes that cyberspace does not simply reference the Internet but the wider imaginary spaces of fantasy role-playing and cultural production. She says artists armed with “hacker knowledge” can recycle and reflect on the social position of ethnic women, so often couched in pornographic terms. If hackers are messing up the online presence of ethnic and women’s organizations, driving unsuspecting people into the domain of online sex, people like Kristina Wong are satirizing these hackers with her “Yellow Fever” mock porno and dating websites, which provide feminist commentary riddled with fake “come-ons” and savvy advertisements about how “everyone wants to date Asian babes.” Chinese American sex hackers like Wong are rewriting the sex code, redirecting the online pornographic male gaze back to her sex-positive critically conscious websites. Cultural myths about Asian sexual prowess and the capitalist demand for “Oriental flesh” are being globally reorganized not in terms of homogenization but differentiation in new global markets that demands increased digital saturation but also sexual stimulation (Tu ibid, 268). Tu further notes, “While it is difficult to assert that Asian women in these industries have ever had much access to spaces of creative expression, digital or otherwise, it is possible to imagine that these technologies they make offer new tools for speaking back to the representational regimes that sustains their social position…enabling of a whole range of creative and political possibilities” (268-269). Sex hacking forces the observer to ask how people (and their gendered avatars) fit or do not fit within digitized social roles. It forces us to comprehend how computer work is always already circumscribed within the domain of “sex” with its gendered ideas of public/private. Such is the effect of sex hacking on “invaginated” lines of miscommunication (Derrida 1980), splicing through our hierarchal world-system with its computerized protocols of domination and serialized dyadic vocabulary of powerful/powerlessness. As Mimi Nguyen writes, postmodern liberal subjects often wish for a “post-body future” bound to a secret wish to “become other” and difference, and so Asian women often adopt secret identities and digital prosthetics that help them “pass” within the reconfiguration of sex codes that “reference a body politic and frameworks of cultural intelligibility that…spectacularize already hypervisible bodies” (2007, 375). By hacking the sexually differentiated and pluralized binaries of the digital world, sex hacking gestures toward a kind of “cybernetic drag,” as Nguyen might put it, rearticulating the abstractions and incoherence of the current technocultural zeitgeist. Staring with the premise is that sexism is rampant and that Asian women and girls are presumed to not “hack it” in a Man’s world, then we might also consider addressing those “girl gamers” who bypass sexist attitudes by presenting themselves as a genderambiguous or as male-bodied. Women gamers are found to be most sexually degraded in first person shooter games, where players attack or hunt from a singular (usually male) point of view, rather than multiplayer games where there are more female characters or roles to choose from. In response, many women regularly trick their fellow players by “going stealth,” adapting to the assumed male role or subverting gender roles in simulated environs of faceless interaction (Schleiner, 2001). Offline, it is harder to upend the gaming world. In gaming tournaments all throughout Asia, from Singapore to China to the Philippines, women are too often found in the role of “ambassadresses,” managing an esports brand or team and making “things look nice” (gamesinasia, 2014).Though more and more women are getting into gaming, most games cater to the male audience, which is where female sex hackers come in. Sex hacking does not apply exclusively to Chinese women but other Asian women. Japan boasts the highest percentage of women gamers in the world (over two-thirds of Japan’s gamers are female), but this Westernized Asian nation with its firm gender roles was flummoxed when transwomen like Kayo Satoh, a Tekken and Street Fighter champ, revealed to the public that she was born “male,” inciting much controversy (gaygamer.net, 2014). Playing video games that riff off ethnic stereotypes and sport a pantheon of sexualized female characters, Kayo managed to hack into the pre-determined sex codes about the role of women (and men) in gaming, later finding fame as a model who released a nude photo-book. Kayo beats men at their own game, initiating a critical discussion of hacking as sexual metaphor that recalls the queer/feminine threat of Asia to the West (which now includes newly industrialized Asian nations and men), a threat epitomized by the “I love you” e-mail virus discussed by Martin Manalansan in his study on Filipino queer men, where the semblance of online intimacy carries the potential for danger to upset gender norms and sociality (2003, 183). Women will play with others through gaming, allowing their competitors to find digital intimacy with them. Such digital penetration masquerading as digital intimacy makes men underestimate the shrewdness and competitiveness of their female counterparts. The sex hacking work of Kayo and other Asian women gamers affords a differing take on hacking as more than a conquest and successful display of technical skill, one that takes into account the public misrecognition of female abilities and exclusion based on assumed incompetence. Insofar as the term hacking both refers to aptitude but also failure (i.e. she is a total “hack”), the sex hacker as an example of the failure of gender expectations, which manages to cut new paths within unequal playing fields. If the hacking is pathway, then sex is the source code that determines the value modeling for the female body and its integration and application in the age of digital penetration, a time when no man-made technology is truly safe or secure from reappropriation. This lack of (male) security is something which I further explore in the next section on espionage.

The limits of the cyborg and the human The cyborg does not come without baggage, and in fact comes with its own value codes, which is perhaps amplified by our increasingly data-driven society that is run by algorithms and other agents that exist in technological infrastructures. Atanasoski and Vora discuss in their essay how these technological, networked infrastructures have begun to bring into question not even who counts as cyborg, but who and what even qualifies as human (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015). Their essay illustrates the limits of posthumanist fantasies of surpassing the boundaries of humanity, and how the views of this techno utopia formulate the ‘surrogate human’. Further, the fantasy that humans can be freed by technology from labor has perhaps collapsed in the age of the networked society, and although surrogate humanity may mark a shift away from capitalism, ‘it does so by reaffirming existing paradigms of racialized and gendered value through the figure of a surrogate human who performs degraded work that is always already meant to be invisible’, (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 7). Although not dealing with the concept of cyborg per se, this essay marks the introduction of the concept of the transhuman, the posthuman, and the surrogate human that technology has promised to create – and its failures to transcend identity in the form of gender, race, class, and ability, and rather continues to function and uphold in a colonialist, historical, capitalist power structure. Technology, the Internet of Things, data, and algorithms that enable the structure of modern day society are never neutral, and in fact all of these data-driven practices further ‘materializes assumptions of what constitutes a human . . .’ (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 13). ‘Techno-utopics surrounding big data, smart objects, and internetworking of humans and machines, however, do not dwell in the vitality of matter, but rather propose the thing as a surrogate human. In this way, they replicate the violent neoliberal impetus to enfold difference into sameness – into a shared space and time’, (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 16). However as Holland notes in their work The Erotic Life of Racism, there are beings that exist in time (white people) and beings who exist in space (Black people) – and when these two beings collide, there is an affront to the material and societal order within which they exist. The idea of technology, the cyborg, the transhuman and the posthuman as identities that exist in a utopia, in a beyond, is a myth that is being perpetuated and shifted by those who already benefit from hegemonic paradigms of what counts as being human in the first place. Bhattarai’s essay then further illustrates these concepts in their essay discussing algorithmic value, and how even investments in algorithms that seem benign are in fact reproducing a certain cultural logic of power in terms of knowledge, labor, and bodies (Bhattarai, 2017). The idea of source code, of algorithms, of data being the genesis of action is naïve – ‘because their agency is enabled and constrained by a larger network of cultural and economic encodings that render them executable’, (Bhattarai, 2017: 21), illuminating again that attempts to make technology and the tech world more inclusive and diverse as well as the attempts to use the category of cyborg as transcending difference are merely the master’s tools disguised as revolutionary action. Technology (and thus, cyborgs), since it is created by humans, carries with it the same limitations as humanity in terms of its ability to provide transcendence of our categorizations of race, class, gender, and ability. In effect, the ‘source code’ is already imbued with certain assumptions of all of these categories of difference, since it is written from the epistemological standpoint and values of those who create it (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). If the tech industry and tech world is heavily dominated by whiteness, by maleness, then in what capacity do those who do not fit into hegemonic notions of humanity (white, cis, hetero, male) figure into these infrastructural equations? Epistemic sites of thought in the theorization of the transhuman, of the posthuman, of the cyborg all exist within the same epistemic paradigms upon which all science and technology are built upon – colonialist, Western, white – and thus are limited in fully conceptualizing a beyond.

Sawayama’s music videos, futuristic aesthetic, and lyricism deconstructs the West’s normalization of Asian women’s subservience. In “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome,” she sings about her personal relationship with technology as a site of solidarity and support, specifically singing, “Came here on my own / But I start to feel alone / Better late than never so I'll be alright / Happiest whenever I'm with you online” (Sawayama, 2017). Here, she also demonstrates how she found an escape from white supremacy through music and the cyber world. Specifically, this song was a project of catharsis to escape whiteness in a different world (Clarke, 2017; Myers, 2017). This production confronts how the cyber realm is traditionally encoded as a sphere of white men’s power as they control narratives of development, innovation, and technological “progress,” establishing technocratic, intangible spaces of dominance. Sawayama’s performativity thus becomes a means to subvert or “hack” the gendered racial formation forced upon Asian women. Hacking, here, “offers an eccentric mode of expression, a means to rupture[...]symbolic currencies and tendencies[...]which can be then decoded or scrambled” (Bui, 2014). Sawayama’s “hacking” of techno-Orientalism is a process of unintelligibility that creates new modes of sociality in that her performance deconstructs Western norms imposed on Asian women. This emerges as people are unable to auditorily grasp and categorize her music. Hacking is produced from her sense of hybridity. She hacks the dragon lady/lotus blossom binary imposed on Asian women. She hacks the West/East binary via the production of diaspora. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway (1991) expands upon how technology can be utilized as a means of subversion writing, “coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world” (p. 152). For Haraway, the cyborg exists in the liminal space between human and technology, which is similar to the configuration of Asians in a techno-Orientalist framework (Haraway, 1991; Roh et al, 2015). Here, the cyborg disturbs a Western understanding of what does/does not constitute the human self by disrupting normative forms of embodiment, subjectivity, and sociality (Haraway, 1991). In her utilization of cyborgism in the music video for “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome,” Sawayama breaks the boundaries between what is technological and what is human, a subversion of the technologization of Asiatic bodies and a form of self-empowerment (Bui, 2014; Haraway, 1991). Sawayama becomes cyborgian through the digitization of her body and surroundings (her steampunk aesthetic, the futuristic background surrounding the car, and the scripting of binary code across her face), which operate as a manifestation of techno-Orientalist logics as she becomes one with technology the same way Asiatic bodies are digitized in the 21st century. Her choice to physically embody technology is thus an instance of overidentification used to disrupt the Occidental gaze and subvert technoOrientalist norms. In Digitizing Race, Lisa Nakamura (2008) highlights the simultaneous debilitating and liberating use of technology on and by Asian bodies. In relation to race neutrality and the erasure of racial violence in the West, Nakamura (2008) states that “the ‘cyberspace model’...ignores these crucial differences. The reduction of all images to sets of binary code seems to pool them all into an undifferentiated soup of bits and bytes” (p. 7). Thus, the Western (white) relationship with technology hinges on a method of erasing difference, a model of racial neutrality that only white individuals are capable of accessing in that only white individuals can distance themselves from their race, whereas people of color are always already racialized and coded into particular stereotypes. Sawayama’s overidentification with technology, a source of Asiatic stereotyping, then, is a physical and metaphysical embodiment that escapes the universalization of the cyber realm as understood by the West, instead using cyberspace to create her own sphere of agency. Simultaneously, Sawayama’s music disturbs racial and gendered norms, such as in the song “Valentine (What’s it Gonna Be)”: [Verse 1] Irresponsible, tired of taking control It's not impossible for us to have it all Your gendered principles were so incompatible But it's not impossible for us to have it all “Valentine (What’s it Gonna Be)” (Sawayama, 2017) Here, Sawayama directly interrogates the Western cultural production of white, heteronormative family structures that manifests during Valentine’s Day, a micropolitical reflection of the West’s macropolitical norms (Lowe, 2015). The line “your gendered principles were so incompatible / but it’s not impossible for us to have it all” becomes an instance of Asian feminist praxis that refuses Western impositions of Asian women’s subjectivity and what they are/are not allowed to “have” in terms of agency and fungibility (Sawayama, 2017). Technology is thus both a means of subjugation and a tactic of resistance; the digitization of her body and music operates in a non-linear temporality, occurring at an unknown point in time as an unknown futurity that operates outside of Western spatio-temporal logics (Bui, 2014; Chang, 2012). In tandem with this, Sawayama’s insertion of herself and her relationship to Asian feminist praxis in her music and music videos becomes a form of digitized embodiment. Edmond Chang (2012), professor of English at Ohio University, articulates how “hacking” challenges the West’s framing of “cyberspace” as a site of disembodiment and distancing from personal identity. Sawayama, like other “hackers,” refuses to “giv[e] into the fantasies of disembodiment that so often characterizes cyberspatial narratives and subjectivities[…]we recover cyberspace as metaphor and model that encourages and embraces intersectionality, interconnectivity, and intertextuality” (Chang, 2012, p. 77). The Western illusion of the definition of cyberspace necessarily becomes a form of disembodiment within the libidinal economy: it is a place in which the manifestation of (white) furtivity — desires of power — occur, such as through the production of Western narratives of dominance over Asian countries that manifest and spread rapidly through cyberspace (Bui, 2014; Chang, 2012). Sawayama’s physical and metaphysical embodiment in her music is thus a disruption of the Western fantasy of detachment from personal identity, culture, and loss. Her utilization of J-pop in her hybridization of music genres is thus an attempt to reclaim cultural and identarian ties lost in the process of Asiatic diaspora (Eng, 2010). Her interweaving of J-pop with R&B and cyberpunk becomes a means of embodying and producing multiple aspects of her identity as a Japanese-British individual, a “hybridity” of Japanese and British cultures through musical exchange and contact (Lowe, 1991; Lowe, 2015). Her music is thus also a transnational challenge to Occidental socio-political norms as her work is not as strictly J-pop or normative Western genres.

**the thing about women and machines is probably a link ab innovation

Akin to posthumanism is the discourse of cyberfeminism, which challenges androcentric readings of technology as well as “disembodied notions of what it means to be human in a virtual age” (du Preez 74). Posthumanism and cyberfeminism supersede the Cartesian notion of an Enlightenment humanism that proposed a default vision of the human subject, devoid of identity features such as race, class, sex, and gender. Critics such as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Anne Balsamo, and Sadie Plant, among others, have tried to assess the relationship between the (female) body and technology, stating that the body is not an essence but a surface on which cultural meanings and discourses are inscribed. In “The Promises of Monsters,” Haraway claims that biology is not a given, but a discourse, and demonstrates it by focusing on the emergence of an “inappropriate/d other,” the cyborg (The Haraway Reader 67). Braidotti argues in favor of the notion of “feminist figurations,” defined as “politically informed images that portray the complex interaction of levels of subjectivity,” and explores the figure of the nomadic feminist (Nomadic Subjects 4). Plant explains that women and machines are recurrently represented either as subjected to or as produced by men, and that, as such, they share a common history: Women, nature and machines have existed for the benefit of man, organisms and devices intended for the service of a history to which they are merely the footnotes. The text itself is patriarchy, the system within which women occupy a world of objects, owned by men and exchanged between them. (“Beyond the Screen” 503) In the end, the three critics demystify the natural and immutable originality of the body, and in so doing they reinforce its reproducibility, performativity, and artificiality, “a surface of intensities, pure simulacra without originals” (Braidotti, Metamorphoses 21). Haraway’s cyborg and Braidotti’s nomad are two figurations that stand for the posthuman in contemporary critical discourse. As will be shown, apart from these two models, Lai’s novel proposes a third one: the status of nonhuman animals, excluded from the moral community and regarded as exploitable resources in the capitalist mode of production (Taylor 177). Haraway refers to them in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” situating the discussion in the context of posthuman criticism: By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted, if not turned into amusement parks—language, tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. [: : : ] Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. (Simians, Cyborgs and Women 151–52) Animal studies engage in the task of legitimating them as subjects and not conceiving them merely as objects of exploitation. The ethical challenge proposed by the posthuman in this light, whether machine or animal, does not invalidate or threaten the human but helps to blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial and the mechanical and the organic, making binaries overlap (Taylor 185). In Hayles’s words, [the posthuman] signals [: : : ] the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. (286) The hybrid figures of the cyborg and the human–animal clone are featured as creatures “in transit” and in continuous reconfiguration of their own physical boundaries, paradoxically associated with fracture and fusion. Both are intertwined with social reality and constitute ethical models that stand for valid representations for women and minority groups in technological societies (Plant, “Coming across the Future” 461). They also implement political tactics, sometimes resorting to open confrontation, and at other times choosing more subtle practices such as irony and coalition (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 106). In the two novels studied here, Lai and Winterson propose the acceptance of the materiality of the body, and specifically of those bodies enhanced by technology, either as half-human and half-machine or as half-animal. Thus technology is understood from a twofold perspective: as a tool at the service of individual enhancement and the liberal market and/or as an instrument of social rebellion. In the pages that follow, technological bodies will be analyzed, taking into account the perspectives of medicine and biology, focusing on the figurations of the cyborg and the clone, and, finally, pondering the influence of technology on sexuality and reproduction.