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Amidst the globalizing forces of multinational capitalism, our life world is simultaneously expanding and contracting, bringing the issues and “faces” of otherness to our daily life. Both in the multicultural society of Canada and in Taiwan, the others—be they laborers, immigrants, ethnic minorities, or those different from “us” in terms of religion, political stance, sexual orientation, customs, and biological composition—constantly challenge our sense of “self” and boundaries, while the mixing of different cultures happen daily and everywhere. Exoticizing the others and their cultures in different forms of commodities seems to be an easy way out: while we, in consumption, thought we comprehended these aestheticized and fetishized differences, we are blind[oblivious] to the fact that the issues of boundaries are matters of daily negotiation, and that there are always faces of the Other beyond our comprehension and challenging our cognitive and emotional capacities. Against such logic of self-satisfying consumption of the others, SFG‘s “post-colonial anti-exotic” strategies “re-politicize” the “exotic” elements by textualizing and hybriding them. The unfamiliar, or de-familiarized, elements in the text, ranging from the mythic goddess Nu Wa, the Oriental spaces of New Kubla Khan and the bar in the Land of Mist and Forgetfulness, to ethnic foods such as durian and salt fish and exotic ornaments such as mask, exotic paper animals, are neither romanticized-fetishized nor decontextualized; instead, they are all multi-contextualized so that their meanings get pluralized. Instead of weaving a consistent system of imagery as modernist novelists do, Lai allows the images to diverge and multiply in meanings, the plotlines to bifurcate and converge repetitively, just as various words and details take on multiple intertextual resonances. These strategies of hybridization, of course, do not undermine the text’s lesbian cause; instead, it constructs a lesbian genealogy and sets it in the context of interacting social levels of business, technology and family relations. The text traces these power relations back and forth in history, in order to locate thoughts and “seeds” of resistance across time and suggest future possibilities. To relate the title of the opening chapter, Bifurcation, to the text as a whole, the word refers not only to the splitting of the human tail, but also to the dual plot of Nu Wa-Salt Fish Girl and Miranda-Evie, the failure and separation of the first pair compensated for and consummated by the child-bearing of the second. However, bifurcation does not happen just once in these major plotlines; the constructed lesbian genealogy is filled with intertexts and repetitions, while in both plotlines there are divergences caused by the characters’ differences from and betrayals of each other. Miranda’s ambivalence is shown in her worries about her job and her fears of Evie, who is “alien and dirty,” with “strange origins” and “odd sisters” (151, 228). No wonder that with the birth of their baby, Miranda thinks that “[e]verything will be all right . . . until next time” (269), implicitly acknowledging the gap between the two of them, and the immensity of the system’s control. Bifurcation in SFG is actually an on-going process of hybridization, which can be manipulated and contained within the capitalist (multicultural) system of control—or an act of openness to and communication with differences. Besides a possible negative future, there is another negative ending in the text: Sonias’ failed sabotage, with many of them killed, their home base destroyed, and only a few survivors running off to a place they knew. The union of Miranda and Evie across the lines of class and “humanity” is no easy matter, just as Miranda does not “yet” recognize the Sonia group as her “family” (249). In a way, the text wants to ask us: what will happen “next time,” and what will happen to the survivors of the Sonia group? Will there be conflicts within and between the two groups, or will the two potentials be realized in a larger resistant group that allows further diversification? By leaving these questions unanswered, the text does not so much trouble the already porous borders of multicultural Canada, as pose the most difficult question to us readers: what does “recognition” mean and how should we “recognize” the others—as lovers, family, or as subjects which are equal but different—in the interconnected and penetrating capitalist systems of communication, which are also systems of commodification through fragmentation, exploitation and exoticization?

**there’s probably some good stuff on how this intersects w/ salt fish girl and it’s dual narrative of nu wa and miranda

Queer Futures While the operative term used most often in the text to describe, characterize, or evoke temporal asynchrony is “queer,” I’m relatively certain that the term is not used self-reflexively, ironically, or in parody.13 Indeed, the seemingly explosive proliferation of the word suggests to me that, like “time,” it’s a productively overdetermined term in the text. Note, for instance, how, in the following example, it connects the North American landscape to Asia: “They’re a queer folk, the Yanks,” Mallory said. . . . “Never saw Americans, just Indians.” And the less said about that the better, Mallory thought. “What did you think of India, by the way?” “It’s a dreadful place, India,” Brian said readily, “brim-full of queer marvels, but dreadful. There’s only one folk in Asia with any sense, and that’s the Japanese.” . . . “Oh,” said Brian, “when you see some Hindu fakir a-sitting in a temple niche, filthy naked with a flower on his hair, who’s to say what goes on in that queer headpiece of his?” (269–270)14 Let me suggest at least one central meaning of queer, as the passage above implies: the term signifies the irruption of inappropriate time lines (nonwhite, non-Western) that threaten Western modernity, precisely because it is those inappropriate time lines that Western modernity relies upon, but must disavow, to establish its own exceptional (white, male, heterosexual) universality. It is not the irruption of the primitive itself that disorders time, since the modern necessarily depends upon this evocation (indeed, without the primitive, modernity wouldn’t be modern). Instead, it’s the way the primitive or primordial past skews the future, as a potent threat to modernity’s present: the queer future, it turns out, is that which potentially counterfeits the “natural” inevitability of the present, thereby exposing it as the future’s asynchronous past. It’s worth noting here, however, that the term “queer” is not the only connective thread between these two narratives: by proving the link between Sybil’s meditation on the “Underground” and Mallory’s archeological digs, excavation becomes the associative metaphor intertwining the text’s anxious evocation of disordered temporalities and queer time lines. Here, again, is Sybil Gerard thinking about the London subway: “It was a queer business, the underground . . . where the navvies had come upon lead waterpipe of the Romans, and coins, and mosaics, and archways, elephant’s teeth a thousand years old. . . . And the digging went on . . . they worked unceasingly, the excavators, boring newer, deeper lines now . . . and soon Lord Babbage’s smokeless trains would slide through them silent as eels, though she found the thought of it somehow unclean” (49). As this passage illustrates, when The Difference Engine says “excavation,” what it means, in fact, is time travel: digging into the earth to assemble “newer, deeper lines” connecting and disconnecting nature (“elephant’s teeth a thousand years old”) to culture (“lead waterpipe . . . and coins, and mosaics, and archways”). Sybil’s sense of the uncannily “unclean” thus dovetails with Mallory’s fear of de-evolutionary regress. More importantly, in both cases, the ostensible icons representing the triumphant progress of Western technology (the clock, the subway) become, at the same time, sources of deep anxiety over what the archeology of such progress might unearth. The London Underground, in this sense, is much like Madeline’s clock: its symbolism registers a double articulation, on the one hand pointing to the way that technologies of time not only support, but render visible, the ideology of “natural” evolutionary progress, even while expressing, on the other, an aporetic uncertainty about the very constitution of the “natural.” If Madeline’s clock is a metonym for the excavated earth, then excavation itself becomes the novel’s larger central metaphor for a type of temporal ordering at which Mallory so excels: a spatial (geologic and geographic) ordering that temporalizes race. Mallory, let us recall, not only sees and understands the “hidden gear-work” of Madeline’s clock, but, as an archeologist, literally pierces through and pieces together the jumbled-up, hidden layers of the earth, thereby reconstructing (by reordering) the geologic truth underwriting the triumphal narrative of (white) “man’s progress.” Here, it is the earth itself that becomes the most “natural” clock of all, measuring not only the spatial distance between races (North America, Asia, India), but also their relative positions in a temporal order (North American and Asian “Indians” as simultaneous in time—both irrationally “queer”—compared to the Japanese). It’s here that the novel’s semiself-reflexive, subtextual Orientalist tropes most revealingly adhere to its representations of technologies of time: the physical, geographic displacement of Asia into North America (and vice versa) suggests a queer, temporal disordering that anxiously rehearses (even as it textually reproduces) nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses positing Asians as developmentally “in-between” the primitive (Africa, North America) and the modern (Europe). Let me return, by way of conclusion, to one final example of the text’s prolific (or profligate) utilization of the term “queer” to better illustrate—if not neatly, then hopefully provocatively—the multifarious points of contact between that term, temporality, technology, and race. Upon meeting, for the first time, a group of Japanese diplomats associated with Laurence Oliphant, Mallory thinks to himself, “the queer little foreigners seemed so young, so idealistic—intelligent, and above all sincere” (170). What is so “queer” about them, in fact, is not only the uniformity and incongruity of their appearance (“Five Asian men sat about [a table], in cross-legged alien dignity: five sober men in their stocking feet, wearing tailored evening-suits from Savile row” [166]), but their unreasonable expectation of an asynchronous leap into modernity. Thus, despite Oliphant’s assertion that “Japan is the Britain of Asia,” Mallory remains skeptical that the Japanese can rightfully claim such equivalent status: “It’s a bit of a hard slog, though, civilization, building an empire. Takes several centuries, you know. . . . For you, in a few short years, to achieve what we have done” (169). Worth highlighting, however, is that Mallory’s skepticism is not directed at the possibility that Japanese could, eventually, attain an equal footing with British modernity, but at their desire to do so out of (temporal) order: “But what you propose is simply impossible!” (170). Most disturbing to Mallory—making the diplomat’s sincerity so queer—is his proclamation that Japan will grasp modernity at any cost: “We will make whatever sacrifice necessary” (170, emphasis in original). If Mallory fails to grasp the veiled threat behind the diplomat’s claim (“perhaps the faint chill in the air was only Mallory’s imagination” [170]), he also misunderstands the similarity between their respective positions. Indeed, this similarity is underscored by the presence of another technological object—a whiskey-pouring automaton, in the form of woman with “a look of mask-like composure and a silky black wealth of hair” (166)—that inspired the fraught exchange in the first place. Unlike Mallory’s initial encounter with Madeline’s clock, however, his encounter with the wooden automaton befuddles his sense of technical mastery. Whereas earlier that clock’s representation of an originary feminine life force seems to affirm Mallory’s (masculine) rational mastery of time, here that force returns as the troublesome sign of a queer, racial-temporal threat, aligning Mallory with what he earlier imaged to be Madeline’s position, unable to piece the deceptively “natural” surface/skin of the “Japanese” automaton: “the woman had not moved so much as an inch. . . . She made no response. Mallory began to wonder if she were ill, or paralyzed. . . . ‘She’s a dummy!’ Mallory blurted” (168). One could argue, at this point, that the text here grants the Japanese characters a certain counterdiscursive tinge. After all, Mallory’s inability to recognize the automaton for what it is directly supports the diplomat’s claim that Japan, like Britain, can achieve prodigious feats of technological superiority. But this claim is immediately checked, I suggest, by the novel’s problematic reproduction of the hoary techno-Orientalist trope of Asians as at once inhumanly premodern and über-modern. And it is, of course, the automaton that yields this truth: for, if Mallory is not given to see that his misrecognition of “her” humanity places him in a queer temporality, then The Difference Engine is likewise not given to acknowledging how its brief evocation of Japan as an implacably threatening, alternate modernity depends upon its representation of the Japanese, with their “alien dignity,” as automatons—mechanistic, reproducible, technological, inhuman. What unites the Japanese automaton with Madeline’s clock is the way each technological object evokes and elides a problematic “origin,” at once past and future, lodged at the heart of any “scientific” technological-temporal ordering. It’s not simply that the Japanese are represented as both “later” (already themselves automatons) and “earlier” (inappropriately premodern) on the developmental time line that evokes a technoOrientalist discourse. Rather, it’s the way this threatening asynchronicity represents, in the larger text, a technicity originating in a sui generis racial homogeneity, a (past-primordial) homogeneity uncannily mirrored in (and foundational to) Mallory’s “scientific” belief in the (future-modern) homogeneity of the perfectly rational “universal” subject. Indeed, what Mallory cannot recognize here is also what most troubles and haunts The Difference Engine’s larger representational matrix: the possibility that race is not discovered by, but in fact constituted through, the “natural” technologies of time—including, of course, clocks, the earth, and other automata.

Women’s Bodies as the Engine of Globalization Specialized systems of military control loop back into gendered techniques for labor management. In the global economy, sex does not only mean cop-ulation or libidinal acts but the categorization of females as a “sex” quite apart from men in all spheres of life. The myth of the sex machine not only denotes prostitution but designates sex-specific forms of labor, such as microchip assembly or garment piecework, predicated on the myth that women are just better at these types of jobs. In the throes of the Cold War, the United States had a hand in the exploitation of Asian women, the racialized feminization of labor and the uneven development between countries that exploits poor women of color as an “accumulation strategy” of transnational capital.85 According to political scientist Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, the crooked path of Vietnam’s modernization first under the aegis of American anticommunism and later under globalization spurred a silent war on local women, turning them into the “collateral damage” of military-assisted market ventures.86 The long march of militarism abetted the implacable advance of global capitalism and its lust for labor by “locating new sources of cheap labor to become the new producers of surplus value.”87 Surplus value turned on the merits of laborers’ use value as machines with particular sex traits. Globalization itself can be viewed as a phallocentric “sex machine” that hardens women’s bodies to be durable for work, while increasing service demands for feminine “soft skills.”88 Asian women, along with other women of color, enter the high-tech industry as data-making human “computers” or “wetware,” as they are referred to by their superiors, since they provide the biological material needed for operating the men’s “hardware.” In this location, women are “reduced to machine components whose claim upon an essential personhood is reduced to their sexuality; that is, their otherness to the electronic machine lies in their sexual function.”89 This sexual function is not always recognizable given the technical facet of their work. Such sex-determined digital work does not mean only women handling metal objects like microchips, since it also applies to the garment industry as evidenced by a 1971 American handbook on needlework and crafts: “In speaking of some far eastern workers one feels like saying ‘rule of eye.’ These embroiders are such by inheritance. No improvements are introduced among their tools—they themselves are human machines.”90 In this handbook, the knitting work of Asian men became evaluated as superior and more human derived than those performed by Asian women, given the latter’s mechanical anatomy and work in a gendered economy of things. In the 1970s, the falling rate of profit for commodities in many developed nations spurred the outsourcing of manufacturing, thus leading to the a “high-tech underclass,” designed to finish putting touches on textiles, semiconductors, and microtechnology, such as silicone chips. To make these chips, workers strenuously place fine gold wires onto small data planes, peering through a tiny microscope all day, for all the new consumer elec- tronics on the market: computers, laser videos, calculators, tape recorders, portable radios, televisions, and watches. U.S. companies dominated world production of integrated circuits in 1976, manufacturing 71 percent of them. 91 By the early 1980s, close to 90 percent of U.S. semiconductor assembly factories were found in Asia.92 Chip bonding by American high-tech firms and Japanese competitors like Hitachi and Toshiba moved to cheap-labor countries such as Indonesia to avoid higher expenditures in more developed Asian nations like Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They sought to find the “cheapest” female workers around.93 By 1980, the electronics industry had become the largest employer of Asian women in the world.94 Economic competition between the United States and Japan and Europe brokered the rise of Asian women as the optimal form of labor for the global conveyer belt. Beginning in the 1970s, shortages in cheap domestic workers in North America and intensifying market competition led U.S. and Japanese multinational firms to transfer their base of operations. Many went to Southeast Asia, given real wage differentials between host countries and exporting nations. A lack of a real transfer of technology from Global North to Global South fed into an international technological barrier, making South and Southeast Asian women stand-ins or proxies for the robots or machines predicted to automate work and replace human labor.95 Manufacturing companies mostly hire men as supervisors, which further ingrains the social construct of women as unthinking slaves and men as organized human planners. Special export-processing zones and supply chains reproduce patriarchal forms of authority by marrying Taylorism with its stringent motion techniques and systematized timed work to the treatment of female “workers as appendages of the machine.”96 This gendered workplace schema plays out in production systems full of human risk. Multinational American companies like Nike hire subcontractors in places like Bangladesh, where corrupt factory owners put mostly women garment workers in hazardous buildings that end up killing thousands of them. With no regard for their humanity, and valued for their mechanized labor, Bangladeshi women are “turned into sewing machines,” and men “turn on” the machines.97 As objects of male conservatorship, the bionic woman (of color) signified the best breed of workers under global labor regimes that made little attempt to “humanize not-yet-modern others” and sought instead to “reaffirm Euro-American humanity.”98 The sex machine trope appeared beyond the factory space to include migrant female workers from former U.S. colonies like the Philippines, who came to be seen as “maid-machines” and “domestic technologies,” in a neocolonial war to be human and independent.99 Per feminist theorist Neferti X. Tadiar, the “equivalence of the Oriental woman and a sexual machine” emerged from the development of colonies into political appendages and economic depen- dents of developing nations. Their laborers “now operate as sexual machines for their developed ‘master.’”100 Crucial to maintaining the scattered hegemonies of patriarchal capital, the sex machine myth has served as a critical site for construing the lives of so many toiling women around the world as not just dehumanized machines but also as hybridized cyborgs.101 The labor-intensive facet of global manufacturing from South Korea and Japan incorporated other parts of the world beyond Asia, such that women in countries like Mexico and Latin America came to be seen as “cyborgs” within parts-assembly plants that globalize/Orientalize the local brown female workers.102 Insofar as Asian export-processing techniques have spread to parts of Latin America, the management style of Japanese and South Korean multinationals are expanding the global myth of the sex machine.103 For Asians specifically, there is a historical switch from being basic automatons to being complex cyborgs. Cyborg is a postmodern concept for imagining a new social identity made from an amalgam of human and machine parts. As higher-grade machines, cyborgs are an improvement over the bionic human since it suggests more of a complete fusion of man and machine, describing an enhanced human with some inorganic parts. But as media studies scholar Jennifer Gonzalez writes, one must examine the social form of this composite subject position as “the cyborg thus is not necessarily more likely to exist free of the social constraints which apply to humans and machines already.”104 In other words, a cyborg may be a cooler updated version of the automaton-machine robot, but it comes with all the same trappings. As social theorist Mimi Nguyen points out, we must excavate “the technological imaginary” to rend the untrammeled form of domination that “manifests across free trade zones and troublesome histories of colonial fantasy.”105 The myth of the sex machine camouflaged the exploitation of female workers even if it simultaneously extended the practice of treating women as “throwaway cyborgs, used as servants, laborers, or toys.”106 The enduring impact of the Cold War on poor women of color problematized the utopian wish for a body politic “divorced from assigned or ascribed characteristics or social location.”107 Cyborg subject formation puts a spotlight on views of “the body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine.”108 The ties between sexuality and machinery remain close, even in the world of cyborgs. Scrutiny of this sexual myth is pivotal given the all-too-convenient lure and trap of thinking of women of color as the ultimate cyborgs. In a 1985 influential essay entitled “A Cyborg Manifesto,” theorist Donna Haraway popularized the concept of the cyborg, envisioning it as a new feminist mythology.109 She writes that female reproductive labor is central to “high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of person and social possibility” and cites the Southeast Asian female worker as “real-life cyborgs.” Haraway later apologized for her imperializing remarks, admitting a failure to recognize the human experience behind those “cyborg women making chips in Asia.”110 The relationship between women and the machines is complicated, if also simplified, by cyborgization. While companies promote beauty contests like “Miss Motorola” and “Miss National Semiconductor,” confusing consumer objects with women’s bodies, one assembly worker in Hong Kong named Mae-fun said: “We girls are cheaper than machines. A machine costs over $2000 and would replace only two of us. And then they would have to hire a machine tender, for $120 a month.”111 Despite predictions since the 1960s of an automated robotic future, one can sense the tension found in mechanized workers who operate as a cheaper substitute and supplement to expensive factory machines. The Malaysian government even advertised the mechanized labor of Malay women to foreign companies: “The manual dexterity of the Oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small, and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a benchassembly production line than the Oriental girl?”112 Automated industrial production enabled one worker to produce ten times as much as before, but this scaled-up productivity did not always entail a move to other high-paying quality jobs. Local human machines were considered sometimes more expedient than the real machines. Long before the development of modern Asian economies, the Asian female’s legendary dexterity was cited a century earlier by Thomas Ewbank, U.S. commissioner of patents. From 1849 to 1852, he discussed the Oriental woman’s body as a form of mechanized labor able to balance heavy pots on her head to transport public water. Her sturdy anatomy was fashioned in such a way as to produce an “adhesion to ancient customs which forms so prominent a feature in Asiatic character.”113 By patenting Asian women as property, the commissioner engages women of color as property, not intellectual creators.114 When Asian nations later industrialized similarly to the United States and Europe, this mythological sense of Asian women as superbeings that can do so many incredible things with their bodies continued. The exploitation of women by developing nations was almost tantamount to “pimping,” a form of state prostitution that enabled capitalist patriarchy on a global scale.115 That Filipino women are now trafficked into Korea, despite official prohibition on the practice, suggests a form of commodification that cannot be explained simply through misogyny but also must take into account model machinery. Researching women’s local experiences and “the practice of humanity” on the ground, anthropologist Aihwa Ong described the ingenious ways Malaysian factory workers would subvert corporatized work schedules with hidden acts of subversion that include foot-dragging of work, jamming of machines, and feigning ignorance of tools, all of which conveyed a reprisal to male management.116 Squelching the myth of deferential automatons, women broke down on factory floors, claiming possession by irate spirits, which introduced an otherworldly dimension into “rational” industrial systems. These revolutionary acts were not an example of “mechanical failure” but evidenced the ways women were unwilling to serve as good specimens of labor performance (robot) and postmodern life (cyborg). These challenges run counter to organizational practices that persist as a form of “industrial sexuality” for “mechanizing women” and “manufacturing the docile worker.”117 A critique of the acquiescent sex machine requires recognizing the sociohistorical conditions that give rise to its mythic aura of the sex machine, one always upended by bold acts of breakage by women.

Hacking Racial and International Binaries through Sex Sex hacking gestures toward various forms of hacking in activities that involve hidden identities, role-playing, cryptic secrets, and occult dealings. The notion of hacking as a kind of sex act complicates simple cultural readings of espionage. Increasing competition between the U.S. and China has raised fears of Asians hackers perforating the country’s national mainframe. Such anxieties echo classic “Yellow Peril” discourses of Chinese workers invading the country, scrambling the bureaucratic codes and technologies of modern border enforcement regimes. Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), thousands of “paper sons” used fake immigration documents and falsified identities to evade sensors, prompting numerous counter-intelligence probes against these foreign “aliens.” Chinese women were almost entirely excluded before their male counterparts under the Page Act (1875). Demonized as hypersexual beings carrying undetectable bugs as prostitutes or oppressed wives expanding polygamous networks, Chinese women were thought to be more dangerous than men in their ability to penetrate the inner “core” of Anglo-American domesticity, thus warranting their total exclusion from the United States (Ngai 2014, Peffer 1986). Throughout modern history, Asians were considered sexually deviant, perverse, and alien to the gender normalcy of White European men and women. As such, they did not inhabit a simple sexual binary, but occupied a liminal inscrutable position as a “third sex,” needing to be hacked and penetrated by outsiders and put under colonial “spheres of influence” that transformed them into modern global subjects (Lee 1999). This third sex classification is further splintered by the power differential between Asian American men and women, a binary complicated by the fact that East Asian men are simultaneously viewed as emasculated/asexual as well as hypersexualized (Espiritu 2008). These days Asian men appear empowered, vested with a re-masculinizing economic position in hightech culture epitomized by the Asian nerd boy and computer engineer geek (i.e., Yahoo’s Jerry Yang). Meanwhile, Asian women appear less savvy and visible in technological culture, perhaps in due part from their historical objectification by the West as hypersexual entities defined primarily by their eroticized bodies. In conversation with other texts and theories on Asian hypersexualization (Shimizu 2007, Tu 2003, Hoang 2014), my critical work reads Asian women’s third sex/hypersexual position as a primary site for reinterpreting binary gender relations within international relations. Hacking is usually approached as the negative excess of the American democratic system, emphasizing individualism over conformity, something not seen as relatable to women or other countries around the world (Lal 2003, 99). In her reading of the ultimate hacker novel Neuromancer, Lisa Nakamura (2003) echoes Lal to observe that the free-floating hacker figure reproduces the Western imperial gaze of “seeing without being seen,” recovering American masculine cowboy frontier ideals that also “draws on and disseminates pornographic Orientalist fantasies of opening Asian beauties” (14). The sex code then extends beyond women but Asian countries like China represented historically in a feminized manner as a secret society to be hacked by Westerners. For me, however, Chinese sex hacker and “rising China” appears as gender queer formations that are simultaneously feminine and masculine, penetrated but also penetrating. Through their sex hacking work, Chinese women shatter the techno-Orientalist imaginary of the East as porous, fluid, and “open” virgin territory for sexual conquest and digital penetration. The rich symbolism of the Chinese sex hacker as linked to the sinister gendered iconography of “rising China” provides a polysemous association that rescripts our globalizing binary sensibilities to force recognition of the multiplicity, hybridity, and amorphousness of global affairs. The sex hacker points to the persistence of the gender binary in capitalist technoculture, but also directs attention to how our binaristic ideas of sex and other things are changing, so much so they require a more critical study of “hacking.” The sex code that demarcates women from men can be analogized to the Chinese-American binary insofar as China is considered now to be a dangerous masculinized-though-feminized ‘Other’ trying to hack into American national security systems, a foreign threat that in turn needs to be matched and intercepted by American technology. The Chinese woman’s hacking work resonates with the looming threat of communist China hacking into the U.S. and the “Free World.” A dialogue about U.S.- China international relations is necessary in conversations about hackers, because hacking is a primary prism through which the U.S. primarily considers its fraught relationship with China and Chinese people in the information era. As industrial systems are becoming increasingly digitized, U.S. government officials are most afraid of the virtual art of war employed by the Chinese. According to the 1999 Cox congressional report on Chinese espionage, China practices a “thousand grains of sand” approach to spying, procuring and acquiring information from the thousands of Chinese foreign tourists, international students, and workers in the states (U.S. Department of Defense 1999). The PRC’s adeptness in tapping into the vast network of overseas Chinese to assemble bits of information to crack American national security turns all Chinese subjects into potential hackers of sorts. The imaginary divide between the normative acceptable self (citizen, civilian) and non-normative “Other” (foreigner, criminal) is jumbled to the point that it is safe to say that hacking is less a skill or subculture of the few than a global matrix of power involving many. My point here is that hacking can indicate more than cyberattacks or programming, but signify a moment of moral crisis when binary relations and epistemologies are put into disarray. An abiding fear of Chinese hacking extends to anxieties surrounding sex hacking. In past decades, several U.S. officers have been duped by sexy Chinese women, who “prey” upon these men’s “Yellow Fever” to enact high-level of acts of espionage or “sexpionage.” These women befriend unsuspecting state diplomats and agents, hacking their phones and electronic files, hoodwinking men who are too spellbound by their exotic charms. One of the latest cases involves a 60-year old former U.S. military contractor, given a seven year prison sentence for passing on national defense security secrets to his girlfriend, a Chinese national in her late 20’s and student of security studies in the states. Prosecutors and FBI have yet to determine if the woman was working for the Beijing government (McAvoy 2014). Like the infamous “Parlor Maid” case (1999- 2004), where government officials could not determine if the Chinese woman named Katrina Leung who became involved with two of America’s top secret agents was a “triple agent,” working for the U.S., China, or herself—the sex hacker/spy appears as an independent agent. No one knows if individuals like Leung worked for any political authority, but the damage of her work to national security is undeniable. In this highprofile case, one reporter writes, the FBI thought “they had a brilliant penetration operation running; but while their top agents were certainly penetrating Katrina Leung, she was penetrating the FBI” (Monk, 2014). Beyond computing, hacking alludes to the ways human affairs are opaque, encrypted, and virtual. At a time when the language of computing infects and redefines so many aspects of life, hacking references more than the theft of computer codes but also serious breaches in our social exchanges, tied to international relations between countries but also gendered exchanges between men and women as well as interracial encounters between Whites and Asians. The China/U.S. divide further complicates domestic racial binaries based on Black/White relations because it introduces other “foreign” racial elements that require further parsing. In a geopolitical sense, sex hacking slices open modern binary relations, which are gender coded as well as racially scripted. It exploits the American’s vulnerabilities in his sexual fetishization of Asian women and demonization of China, exposing weaknesses in those Western imperial agents who believed they can penetrate the feminine “Other,” the latter assumed in a virtual position of fixed distance/intimacy rather than one of assertive digital penetration with all its potent dangers. The sex hacker thus can be both a seductive Lotus Blossom and cunning Dragon Lady, the latter defined as a femme fatale who uses her calculating and seductive abilities to deceive, trick, and bring down men and governments. While bearing affinities to the girly playful Lotus Blossom figure, a sex hacker is also not unlike a Dragon Lady, a highachieving and intelligent sexual being who revels in her Orientalist mystique and feminine mastery of the art of deception. However, the sex hacker embodies not so much the one-dimensional trope of ethnic villainy or female betrayal, but expresses the problems of representing the “Other” at a time the Other is not to be found in a foreign “elsewhere” but everywhere. If computer hackers are able to look behind the screen of new media to understand the organizing binary logic behind technology, sex hackers do more than “lift the veil” of Oriental feminine mystique to peer into the sexual technologies and coupling of power/knowledge…they shatter and beguile the codes ascribed to digital bodies themselves.

In our technologically “enhanced” times, when the global “sex machine” (e.g., how globalization processes rework our bounded ideas of sex and gender) recasts Asian women as hyperfeminine but also hypermasculine through the gender realignments of capitalist modernity (Ling 1999), digital penetration these days is characterized by the embedding of Asian women’s soft and “hardened” laboring bodies within high-tech scientific industries controlled by wealthy governments, multinational corporations, and savvy business gurus. Despite this muddling of private and public space, the masculine and the feminine, the local and the global—the social engineering of gender still follows the traditional binary logic of women as mere “servers” responding to others’ desires and requests by a global roster of “clients.” Thinking of women as major players and actors “creating affective and visceral responses as theater between the codes of the utilitarian-effective” spaces of late capitalism works to raise “questions of poetry, ethics and justice” (Nadir 2012). Hacking as a kind of social performance offers a performative anti-model of capitalist commodification and a queer model of sexual/gender disidentification (Munoz 1999), inspiring small-scale forms of action that defy the globally “scattered hegemonies” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) of racism, sexism, and capitalism. Sexist assumptions about women’s networking abilities can prove deadly. In actor network theory, the nonhuman object participates in the network, and given the ways Asian women have been rendered as objects of Western fantasy and the playthings of men, one can imagine how they have not only been objectified by technoculture but turned that objectification into an advantage. Xiao Tian is the new general of China’s “hacker babes” smashing patriarchal systems of control and wanted by many security agencies for her online defacements (Figure 1). Posing in coy doll-like positions on her online blog, the teenager’s flirty self-portraits or “selfies” are disarming in their dual connotations of Oriental submissiveness and feminine treachery.

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Miranda is queerly produced and queerly reproduces. Her menopausal mother immaculately conceives her after consuming durian fruit harvested from the Unregulated Zone. Salt Fish Girl ambiguously fails to clarify whether Miranda is conceived by this consumption, because the durian has been genetically modified by Dr. Flowers to induce fertility, or whether the conception results from Nu Wa’s having implanted her “genetic essence” into the fruit (Bahng 680). The precise mechanics of reproduction aside, the novel suggests that Miranda, like her mother, becomes pregnant by eating durian. In the moment that she ostensibly conceives, Miranda describes the fruit as an animal-like organism: The yellow pieces glistened like fresh organ meat. . . . I had always thought there was something cannibalistic about eating [durian], and so I never had. But this time an overwhelming sense of wonder compelled me. I scooped the creamy yellow flesh into my mouth, felt its taste and odour merge with my own. It gave me a very peculiar sensation, as though I’d bitten my own tongue. And yet it was delicious. (223-24) “[Y]ellow flesh,” evocative of a euphemism for Asianness, racially infuses the durian. Miranda expresses bodily identification with the “fresh organ meat,” thinking that eating it is somehow “cannibalistic,” a suggestion that perhaps connotes notions of primitive savagery. To her, the “yellow flesh” tastes like her own yellow flesh, leaving her with the “very peculiar sensation” that she has “bitten [her] own tongue.” The language, of course, mirrors Nu Wa’s dream of eating the human-sized fish that likewise tastes like her own tongue. For Miranda, the durian becomes animal-like not only through its “reptilian” qualities but also because the fruit tastes like her own animalistic body. The seemingly autoerotic and “cannibalistic” act of consuming the fruit can thus be read as a form of trans-species reproduction, the queer interaction between the body of the durian and the body of Miranda resulting in the production of a new body. Like Miranda, the “Sonia” clones also engage in queer reproduction. Larissa Lai describes the Sonias as hybrid entities, “[m]anufactured from the DNA of a Chinese-Canadian woman interned with her Japanese-Canadian husband during the Second World War, combined with the DNA of freshwater carp in order to get around human cloning laws” (“Future” 175). Evie, in particular, “is no figure of purity.” She describes herself as “point zero three per cent fresh Cyprinus carpio — freshwater carp. I’m a patented new fucking life form” (Salt 158). The same fishy spots that make Miranda not quite human are likewise used to dehumanize the Sonias, allowing Flowers to enslave them in his capitalistic production of Pallas shoes. The artificial insertion of the animal into the racialized body transforms the Asian body into a kind of liminal entity, neither human nor animal. The “unnaturalness” of Evie’s origin becomes a source of anxiety for Miranda, even though she similarly possesses fish-like qualities. This anxiety about the unnatural implicitly reflects fears about purity, both of the human body generally and of racial purity specifically. The hybrid human-animal body carries the threat of racial miscegenation, eliciting the fear of a body that cannot be codified by normative structures of identity. The overdetermination of the human-animal hybrid performs the subversive disruption that Chen sees in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “the body without organs”: The body without organs is that body that actively refuses its own subjectivity by engaging the dis-ordering of its “organs.” In the body without organs, no given organ has merely one functionality, and the organism itself cannot be represented as an ordered system. Instead, the body without organs makes impossible any coercive systematicity by affirming an infinite functionality and interrelation of the “parts” within, “parts” that can only be individuated by one of an infinite number of permutations of a body into “parts.” (Chen 151-52) Deleuze and Guattari’s concept gestures toward the interdependence of all organs within a single body. The distinction between one organ (“part”) and the next becomes muddied in the body in which all of the organs function in “interrelation.” Likewise, the delineation between what is distinctly human and what is distinctly animal blurs in the body that is both. The fishiness of her genes transforms Evie into a new life form that exceeds humanness, despite her human-like form. Nu Wa’s bifurcated tail and shape-shifting form similarly express this categorical blurriness. Are her legs a split tail? Is her tail fused legs? By oscillating between human and animal, the liminality of the human-animal body resists being contained by a system of recognition that equates a body’s value with its humanness. As Tara Lee argues, however, we must remember that the fragmentation of the body has sometimes been employed by neoliberal capitalism: “The corporate manipulation of the body entails a disassembly, but more importantly, a reassembly . . . that is a conglomeration of parts gathered from multiple sources” (99). Lee further posits that, “While capitalism wants to sanitize away the fragmentation it has perpetrated, Lai’s durian politics insists, like [Donna] Haraway’s cyborg politics, ‘on noise and pollution’ . . . to demonstrate that the disruptive body cannot be eliminated so effortlessly” (105). The human-animal body is capable of dissent through its evolutionary descent. In other words, it dissents through the ruptures of animality that refuse the ostensible cohesiveness of the fully evolved human subject.

Throughout Salt Fish Girl, Lai is careful to reject the traditional cyberpunk use of the passive techno-Orientalized female body as she articulates the consequences of nonnormative reproduction for racially minoritized bodies. Writing in the late 1990s as the emerging issue of cloning fueled Western imaginations, Marlene Barr speculates that “the most dangerous issue is not duplication but, rather, the lack of mass production of certain humans: gays, Jews, people of color, women” (203). Going against Barr’s particular dystopian fear of the erasure of sexual and racial minorities, however, Lai imagines a world wherein the cloned bodies are only women of color. Lai explores the very scenario that Barr does not predict: what would happen if mass-produced clone are those of bodies already exploited by the global capitalist system? Lai’s critique of the Western marginalization (and exploitation) of the Asian body is strongly evident through Miranda’s apprehension and horror over cloning. On entering Dr. Flower’s experimental laboratory hideaway in the mountains, Miranda follows the escaped clone Evie and sees “the fridges where all the DNA was kept, the vials of fertilized and unfertilized eggs, the cold steel tables upon which the act of creation took place. All these tidy attempts to control the mud and muck of origin upset me” (268). Dr. Flower’s experiments with cloning translate literally into attempts at controlling paternity and maternity of the Asian body—a way to either contain or erase racialized otherness that is seen as threatening, or contaminating (just like the sleeping disease), to the white male body. In Lai’s dystopian scenario, it is a small leap to make from the exploitation of racialized women’s labor in the present world to the one of 2044 where women of color are mass produced solely for the exploitation of their labor. Evie believes that her cloned genes might have originated from a Chinese woman named Ai who married a Japanese man and was interned in the Rockies during World War II, but most likely, the clones—all named Sonia, as another measure to strip them of individuality and agency—are genetic composites pulled from the “Diverse Genome Project” which “focused on the peoples of the so-called Third World, Aboriginal peoples, and peoples in danger of extinction” (160). The bodies of the Sonia clones are treated as tools of production: Evie tells Miranda that she is one of “at least a hundred thousand” (158) clones bred and forced to work for Nextcorp, a corporation that produces Pallas shoes (157). The worker clones are controlled by an implanted mechanical device, their “Guardian Angel,” which “looks after us, monitors our body temperature, notes the presence of disease, helps rescuers find us if we get lost” (159). The Sonias are neither autonomous beings nor human— they are literally manufactured bodies, products, to be used and thrown away. Clones, just like real Eastern world factory workers, are ultimately deemed lesser beings as the whims of the marketplace determine their value. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai exposes the harsh reality of cyberpunk’s techno-Orientalized body—technology does not free it from suffering or erase the moral failings of those who seek to exploit it. Further deepening the perceived otherness of the Sonia clones is the indeterminacy of their origins. Miranda is shocked by Evie’s admission of her illegal nonhuman status (158), as she explains that her “genes are point zero three percent Cyprinuscarpio freshwater carp. I’m a patented new fucking life form” (158). Taken out of the realm of the human, Evie and the other Sonia clones are reduced to their patented genes—they become nothing more than tools for production. Addressing the clones’ indeterminate humanity, Robyn Morris argues, “The figure of Evie, and her human/fish genes, exists in a liminal state, neither fully human nor non-human. This ambiguity surrounding her identity is one way that Lai complicated conceptions of humanness as whole, centered, complete; ‘the real thing’” (92). Despite recognizing her own corporeal difference, Miranda’s discomfort with Evie reflects current anxieties surrounding cloning as a technology that challenges normative definitions of what constitutes a human being and brings into question who (or what) is ultimately responsible for human agency and creation. Lai emphasizes that the clone body, the techno-Orientalized body, is nevertheless an active one. Owning their right to reproduce, the escaped Sonias use genetically engineered durian fruits (the same fruit that brought Miranda into being) to bear children. Living and creating families outside of the factories, the clone Sonias reject subjection and control by those who deny them their humanity and insist on creating new lives, literally, for themselves. While Lai warns against the exploitive use of cloning and genetic modification, she also proposes that when taken up outside of dominant power structures, such technologies can be enabling for marginalized bodies by offering them novel modes of replication. “It is through Evie and the Sonias’ quest for independence that Lai rejects the narrativizing of women, and more particularly, women of Asian descent, as passive and silent under white, Western, patriarchal scrutiny” (Robyn Morris 89), effectively refiguring the central hackerhero of classic cyberpunk. While global capitalism seeks to turn Asian bodies into expendable workers for the pleasure and use of an insatiable Westernized market, Lai situates her Asian female characters as operating competently and creatively within society, within the real world, despite its exclusionary cultural constructions of their identity.

(Alexander Nikitin, Department of Philosophy of Moscow State University in 1979. Ph.D. -International Relations, Professor of the Department of Political Sciences, Director of the Center for Euro-Atlantic Security of the Institute for International Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations" Political and Economic Causes of War" 2000. ; LF)

Political contradictions and clashes of interest do not lead to war until they are manifested, sharpened and pushed to the extremes in ideologies and propaganda. Conflicting political interests are still interests of limited social groups (more often - elites), while wars require involvement and participation, concentration and starvation of whole nations, much broader masses of people.

At some point, standpoint theory shades into a third set of critiques that challenge not only the terms by which science is conducted, but the motivations and social role that science performs.101 Such “postmodern feminist” theory examines the position of the scientific enterprise in the modern social and cultural milieu.102 Feminist scholars in this camp charge that gendered science produces not merely bad data, or incomplete knowledge, but constitutes a fundamentally oppressive social construct that serves to obscure the plurality of human experience.103 On this view, the scientific endeavor, and the technological applications that follow from scientific discovery, assumes a coherent and unitary view of reality that lends itself to control and domination. The implication is that because the assumptions and ideologies on which science are based are culturally pervasive, and because those assumptions and ideologies are gendered, a society based upon the scientific enterprise will systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups.104

Feminist research speaks directly to these challenges and has much to contribute in helping solve the climate crisis by strengthening integrated risks assessments, platforms and responses. Spanning critical scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, feminist research contributes indispensable analytical, ethical and methodological tools precisely because it has accrued expertise in interrogating overlapping and multiple forms of insecurities across different sites from gendered bodies, households and communities, to state level and globally. This article identifies these feminist tools as intersectionality, the ethics of care, and situated knowledge.

An intersectional approach 

However, one might also imagine feminist critics using the starting point of women as property to critique the notion of private property in favor of a less rigid understanding of ownership of tangible things. From this perspective, much as with copyright, it is possible for feminists to offer an underlying critique of the idea of private property that one day may transform a system of property that continues to work more in favor of men than of women.110

In an effort to examine private property through a feminist lens, one could argue that the seemingly “rational” world of property discourse is in effect a story where not all actors can be predicted to behave in the name of rational self-interest.111 Specifically, women as mothers will most likely not order moral choices about property in a manner that will only benefit themselves to the exclusion of others (the otherwise “rational” choice).112

Because this view challenges not only the fundamental principles of sciences, but also the fundamentals of their place in society, it is difficult to imagine what de-gendered science would look like.105 Meeting this set of objections requires not merely re-thinking scientific epistemology from the ground up, but thinking entirely "outside the box" of our current social positioning of science. Such an approach, as suggested by Donna Haraway, rejects the feasibility of an omniscient viewpoint or "god trick" in considering either scientific knowledge or technological practice.106 Haraway's approach embraces the concept of "situated knowledge," which only exists in a specific context and cannot be evaluated without reference to that context.107 Haraway argues that it is critical to take into account the network of contributors, collaborators, influences, and ingredients that attend any insight, innovation, or intuition.108 Abstracting away the network of inputs to knowledge creates a false sense of objectivity that invites political manipulation. Consequently, Haraway argues that we must be satisfied with "partial perspective" rather than objective perspectives, and indeed regard the concrete grounding of situated, partial perspectives as an advantage rather than a disadvantage.109

Haraway's approach offers a potential remedy to MacKinnon's concern that the objective stance allows the observer to project onto the object of consideration his own desires and expectations. A situated context takes account of the observer's relationship to the observed and indeed moves the subject of observation from the category of passive object to active participant in knowledge development. Haraway takes particular note of the relationship between human and material actors in the development of technology.110 Drawing in part on concepts from actor-network theory111, Haraway argues that technology must be viewed as a co-construction between humans and non-humans.112 The material world does not merely reflect the conditions and expectations of human actors, but must be recognized as having its own character, possibly even its own type of agency. Haraway invokes the image of the legendary Native American Coyote or Trickster as the metaphor to visualize the participatory, if perhaps non-volitional, nature of material agency.113 Mythologically, the Trickster represents a non-human entity that behaves in unexpected and disruptive fashion. In Haraway's conception of materiality, the Trickster archetype underscores the independent and unruly contributions of material participants to invention and discovery, reminding us, as Karen Barad puts it, that "the world kicks back."114

Diversity is a start, but beyond a box-checking or optics exercise, any initiatives aimed at creating inclusive leadership must give voice to different perspectives. This requires both critical mass of diversity, and leadership that creates psychological safety for differing opinions and viewpoints to be brought to the table. The focus on creating not only diverse representation but also a lens of inclusion is likewise key. Given the spectrum of identities, especially when considering intersectionalities,35 no team can ever fully represent consumers or competitors or society broadly. What matters then instead is that the team is both diverse and constantly exploring blindspots and unpacking assumptions. For teams to be inclusive – no matter how diverse they are – they should be constantly increasing their awareness of different experiences, and apply that learning in a regimented way. The example set by the Mexican government, which trained all of its foreign service officials in one model, is to be emulated, especially if the training is ongoing and not expected to deliver all benefits after one session. The Canadian government’s GBA Plus offers another model – one which has already been applied in the competition law and policy context.3 Broadening the aperture of what is examined and prioritized involves not only representation in places of power, but also input from sources beyond just those sitting at the table. This includes seeking information from affected people, rather than assuming that the experts at the table making decisions for others inherently know best.37 In the FFP context, this broader perspective lies in particular contrast to traditional “realist” foreign policy approaches. Yet as proponents of FFP describe, more diverse perspectives from girls and women (in or outside the decision room) lead to more options and ideas brought to the decision-making discussion, which leads to more peace.38 It also opens the doors to others beyond women and girls. Creating a gender lens through FFP, for example, has led to questions about who else is not represented, along with demands for greater input from other underrepresented groups - including racial minorities, people with disabilities, the elderly, and other underrepresented groups. The European Parliament, for example, has expanded FFP’s purview to include LGBTQ rights.39 Opening that door also brings attention and efforts to issues that have been men’s issues but were not previously discussed. For example, men have been victims of sexual assault in the military and sexual violence as a tool of war for millennia, but did not raise these as key policy issues until women spoke out and action was demanded to address this “women’s issue” – which then led to men coming forward as well.40 Similarly, in the antitrust context, focusing on “women’s issues” such as childcare markets may more directly impact women, who bear most of the child care burden - but will directly impact single fathers or other men with primary or equal childcare responsibilities, and will indirectly impact virtually all men (those with children, those working with women with children, those relying on the work of people with children, etcetera). In other markets, men may benefit from the greater price sensitivity of women if that sensitivity is disaggregated and considered in enforcers’ antitrust analyses.41 Inclusive antitrust could extend this lens to other underrepresented groups as well. As the foregoing makes clear, FFP is not about advantaging women to disadvantage men; in nearly all cases, all benefit from inclusive policies. Men benefit as a whole from more comprehensive solutions to cross-border issues such as armament, health pandemics, climate change, and digital regulation. FFP also does not mean reducing funding for other priorities, instead it focuses on spending resources more effectively in a way that “is inclusive in its reach and benefits, and therefore accelerates progress towards global security and prosperity.”42 FFP notes the two way street of a feminist foreign policy: it focuses on promoting gender equality, but it also yields better foreign policy outcomes.43

Inclusive antitrust – the idea that antitrust should be deliberately focused on hearing from and serving everyone – aspires to make antitrust better by improving data inputs, options, and outcomes. An inclusive antitrust policy may encompass a spectrum of options for how antitrust and its drivers are shaped and deployed to achieve healthy competition with minimal unintended negative ancillary effects. In laying out and considering these options, Feminist Foreign Policy – already the official government foreign policy of Canada, Mexico, France, Luxembourg, the European Parliament, and Spain – presents lessons for inclusive antitrust. The lessons gleaned provide steps that can be undertaken in both the near and long terms, from leadership to process to data use – and could not be timelier in light of calls for antitrust and competition law reform and upheaval taking place around the world. Feminist Foreign Policy provides guideposts to improve antitrust policy by offering principles in expanding information and data that can contribute to more effective analysis. Inclusive antitrust aims to use better (inclusive) data to inform decision making and achieve (more inclusive) policy outcomes and decisions that serve competition goals more effectively and broadly. Whether the justifications for antitrust to be inclusive are value, purpose or efficiency-based, the concept of incorporating more complete information and evidence with a broader lens to better capture market complexities seems compelling. Being inclusive is especially important as antitrust aims to create space for competition and more level playing fields to benefit consumers across society, and prides itself on data driven decision-making. This article looks to inclusive policy forerunners to explore approaches to inclusive antitrust. Similar to antitrust, foreign policy – historically driven by a focus on defense and military force2 – is a field where inclusion has not been the dominant policy driver. And yet an increasing number of countries are officially adopting an inclusive foreign policy approach, boldly named Feminist Foreign Policy (“FFP”). FFP provides both experience and lessons for inclusive antitrust. While foreign policy may have different objectives, players, and dynamics than competition law, those differences do not diminish the transferability of the principles discussed here. Notably, foreign policy and antitrust share core commonalities: both focus on mitigating the negative effects that can occur from power imbalances. Applying an inclusive lens on a traditionally “hard power” field carries lessons for the “hard economics” and “hard data” driven field of antitrust and competition law. In line with the axiom that representation matters, FFP calls for a critical look at who is in decision-making roles across organizations, and commits to working towards meaningful diversity. This generally means diversity not only among top leaders, and not only in specific areas, but at every level across areas of expertise. Given the feminist or gender lens, the focus is primarily on ensuring that women are represented. Yet the importance of intersectional representation is gaining attention, as is the need for diversity generally FFP pulls back from narrower questions of military operations and defense, to focus on the broader goal of peace and security. In doing so, it dispenses with the assumption that a military and defense focus is the only endpoint that can assure peace and security. It seeks instead to incorporate a more holistic assessment of peace and security that includes the complexities of many different threads, such as trade agreements, economic growth, climate, cybersecurity, global health, and other domestic policies with cross border effects.57 It essentially calls for a systems design approach to foreign policy58 that also involves a culture of collaboration across institutions.59 As antitrust becomes increasingly complex, it cannot isolate itself from other areas. To be robust, antitrust policy and enforcement must consider interactions with other areas such as intellectual property, privacy, cybersecurity, national security, supply chain… yes, even foreign policy. Looking at how FFP is enhancing the ability of foreign policy to assess complex problems by improving the data used and strategic analysis is a model for those making antitrust policy – and providing strategic antitrust advice One additional lesson from FFP is to be prepared for criticisms that this all sounds good in theory, but the idea of applying it seems unrealistic.70 The lessons above highlight several areas where changes towards inclusive antitrust are straightforward and can be immediately implemented without substantive changes to antitrust or even significant funding increases. Changes already afoot in antitrust, especially in terms of institutional changes and enhanced technology expertise, also present particular opportunities to apply other inclusive policy lessons in the near term. In the longer term, where significant additional resources might be required and additional study desired, empirical research is already underway and can be further supported and bolstered. Given the immense workload already besetting antitrust and competition authorities, the appropriate place to begin may be with low hanging fruit: start with leadership, data collection, and embedding top-to-bottom inclusive norms, data use, and processes in any new institutional structures. Creating diverse teams is widely acceptable and has become a key part of the U.S. and EU governments.71 This should be complemented with regular inclusivity development education that helps individuals identify and address perspectives not represented who should be brought into the analysis. The Canadian process has made many tools and training broadly available, which can serve as a foundation to build upon. Creating inclusive institutions can be challenging when it involves addressing structures and cultures firmly entrenched. The creation of new competition units, however, especially data focused units such as the CMA’s DaTA Unit, the FTC’s Tech Enforcement Division, 72 and the Data Center proposed by Senator Klobuchar’s CALERA legislation,73 offer an opportunity to make these organizations inclusive by design – from the outset and from top to bottom: leadership and personnel to data use to analysis and decision-making. The CMA’s DaTA unit seems to be doing some of this already, for example through its work focused on algorithm bias.74 Creating explicit commitments, objectives and plans for thorough inclusion could lay foundations that will embed inclusivity and serve as a model for more established organizations to embrace inclusive antitrust principles. The benefit here, given the focus on data of these new organizations, is that they can embrace the focus on making data use inclusive from the beginning through their “digital DNA”75 while also avoiding entrenching the well documented biases and exclusive practices that notoriously pervade some Silicon Valley organizations.76

Legal scholar Deborah Halbert argues () that the public domain is inherently ‘feminine’ because it rejects dualities: it does not privilege a single way of knowing and doing over another.

It builds bridges to alternative ways of knowing, which are not mediated by market-based exchange. Rather, the public domain is built on social bonds – gifts, rather than commodities. It is feminine in the current global gender order (i.e. hegemonic patriarchy) because it recognizes that production is an inescapably communal activity; which makes sharing with the community ‘morally appropriate’ (). Halbert’s conception of the public domain is resonant with Nancy Fraser’s ‘sphere of social reproduction’ (Arruzza, Fraser, and Bhattacharya , 8). The social reproduction sphere encompasses sites upon which the young are socialized, communities built, meaning produced and social bonds forged: in ‘households, neighbourhoods, civil society associations, and public institutions, including schools, childcare and eldercare centers’. This sphere – distinct from that of commodity production and waged labour, is what sustains and makes capitalism possible (Fraser and Jaeggi ). Both conceptions of the social reproduction sphere and the public domain reflect feminist epistemologies; they are sites of subordination – and accordingly, of radical possibility. I invoke these conceptions in proposing what is an expansively feminist, decolonial project: the reclamation of the public domain in service of the social good, rather than in service of commodity production and capital accumulation.

The public domain could potentially be viewed as a good choice of knowledge framework for traditional knowledge, identified as it is with freedom and equality of access. The public domain is by its nature equally available to all who would use the information contained within it.1 0 6 Thus it would seem to conform to Principles 1 and 2, as access is not facially dependent on the user's financial resources and the knowledge could be used for development by those too poor to pay for it. It does not, however, meet the gender-specific goals, Principles 3 and 4; women would not necessarily gain any particular credit for their work and ideas, nor would they gain any remuneration that might be used for economic advancement and community development. Additionally, the "equal access" nature of the public domain may not be so equal; more frequently, it is the developed world that has the capital and infrastructure to exploit the knowledge contained in the public domain, often converting that knowledge into patentable innovation. 1 0 7 The equal access vision of the public domain may be more romanticization than reality.10 8 One way in which the public domain might be useful as a framework for women's traditional knowledge would be as a basis on which to build what I will call a "public domain plus" regime. Such a regime would leave the knowledge in the public domain, free from the threat of enclosure by private entities for their exclusive use, but would tack on a new requirement: anyone using the knowledge or product could do so but would need to give public recognition to the community of women in which it originated. 1 09 For example, a company could market a distinctive cloth woven by women of a particular tribe or village, with a statement attached both in marketing materials and on the cloth's label giving credit to the women with whom the idea and conceptual creation of the product originated, even if they did not physically make it. This regime would thus comport with Principle 3, highlighting women's knowledge and valuing their work, but would still not fulfill Principle 4, as women would receive no economic return for their knowledge. However, let us not abandon "public domain plus" quite yet: as will be set out below, patents and geographical indications (GIs) may be difficult for women to obtain in order to protect their traditional knowledge. 110 Thus, the focus may necessarily turn to "recognition" of women's traditional knowledge, rather than "protection" of the same. Recognition would mean giving credit where credit is due, using women's knowledge but freely announcing its source. Unlike patentees, women would likely not be able to enforce conditions such as receiving credit; thus I propose voluntary principles which entities looking to use the fruits of women's traditional knowledge could follow in cases where the women hold no patent and the knowledge is technically in the public domain.' 11 First, the use of women's traditional knowledge should be acknowledged and the community of women who are its source identified as such in labeling and advertising. Second, companies should consider remitting at least a small portion of the profits made from the use of such knowledge to the source community; even if not required by law, such a remittance would make the use more equitable and could, of course, be cited by a company as part of its community assistance efforts. 112 In this way, women's traditional knowledge would be made available to the public, but women's contributions would be recognized and might even result in some amount of remuneration, thus creating both economic and social value in women's work. While not ideal, this solution may be the best we can do within the current legal framework. The potential dangers of the patent system must remain present in any plans regarding patent use; historically and even in the present day, patents (and, Patel argues, the IPR system generally) "reserve[] the Third World markets to foreigners .... The system guarantees private foreign gains at public cost to the Third World."' "18 In addition to their general hostility to redistribution and their historical harm to the developing world, patents do nothing to advance women qua women. Patents are (supposedly) genderblind-they would grant no particular recognition to women's work as such and thus continue to keep it invisible and undervalued except insofar as women's ideas might prove profitable to a foreign body that wishes to license them. This occurrence, as Patel indicates, might be quite infrequent. 1 Instead, the more important issue for women holders of traditional knowledge with regard to patents is finding ways to keep others from patenting their knowledge. Because much of women's traditional knowledge is not widely known, it may easily be exploited by sophisticated entities. 10 Thus, it would be wise to pursue documentation of women's knowledge, such that entities looking to patent products or processes that have their roots in exploited women's knowledge may not be granted. To this extent, libraries and registers which document traditional knowledge 21 (such as India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library or TKDL 122 ) are an excellent idea, as they may keep such exploitative patents from being granted, though they should also add a label internally for traditional knowledge that is primarily held by women.123 Of course, in order to keep exploitative patents from being granted, patent offices would have to be encouraged to make use of traditional knowledge registers when researching "prior art" on patent applications. This requirement is sadly lacking at present, and advocates should consider ways of incorporating it into their national patent offices' regulatory framework. 1 24 This documentation would not give women a patent-like right in the knowledge, so it is unimportant who adds the knowledge to the database. In summary, the potentially most useful policy changes where patents are concerned would include: 1) the expansion of traditional knowledge catalogues and databases, with more traditional knowledge included; 2) the addition of a gender tag or category, such that women's contribution to traditional knowledge would be recognized within the databases; and 3) broadly enforced requirements within national and international patent offices that the contents of these databases be searched as part of meeting the novelty requirement for patent applications. In summary of the policy recommendations of this Comment, I propose the following: 1) a "public domain plus" system of voluntary recognition and remittance by entities planning to create products whose roots lie in women's traditional knowledge, where a company using the knowledge would indicate the knowledge's origin and perhaps remit part of its profits to the women's home community as part of a voluntary program; 2) that more traditional knowledge libraries, catalogues, and databases be established; 3) that these libraries include a tag for gender, indicating whether the source of the knowledge is primarily women; and 4) that national and international patent offices include a requirement that these libraries be searched as part of fulfilling the novelty requirement of patent applications. Women have been "holding up two-thirds of the sky" for centuries, but their contributions outside of the science lab have been largely unsung, unheeded, and unrewarded. Advances in the literature on traditional knowledge in recent years have meant many steps in the right direction, but it is time for the blinders to come off with regard to gender. A gendered lens should be adopted for analysis of traditional knowledge in theory as well as in practice, with sound guiding principles established for the formation of policy to recognize the value and existence of women's traditional knowledge. Anything less falls short, for both traditional knowledge and feminism.

From a feminist perspective, of course, the childbirth metaphor could be reimagined to yield alternative conclusions about the relationship of author to text. Rather than a bond based on single-sexed origination, patrilineal lineage, and enduring control, childbirth for the biological mother requires an inevitable letting go: the cutting of the umbilical cord, nurturing, raising and preparing the child to go out into the world, to speak on its own behalf, to interact and form relations with others, to have children of its own. Perhaps, then, the creation-aschildbirth metaphor can be used critically to reimagine the relationship between author and text, and between texts in the ongoing process of cultural creation. Mark Rose makes a similar argument by emphasizing, rather than the relationship of mother and child, the modern understanding of human genetics: [T]he paternity metaphor obscures the fact that literary works are the products of complex collaborations in which many individuals are involved . . . , and that literary works are produced through acts of generation that involve the adaptation and transformation of materials from the literary gene pool rather than creation out of nothingness. . . . The paternity metaphor is patriarchal and obsolete. More significantly, the entire conception of authorship embedded in the paternity trope is obsolete. We need a better biology of authorship. 83 Either conceptual approach is an attempt to disrupt the “male motherhood” metaphor that shaped Romantic conceptions of genuine authorship, and pervaded legal discourse in the justification of authors’ rights. Both illustrate the way in which copyright law, freed from gendered notions of authorship and genius, might evolve to better reflect the processes of intellectual creativity and the dynamic nature of the text. IV. A Feminist Aesthetics for Copyright Law? I have suggested, in the preceding sections, that copyright law is not aesthetically neutral, despite common claims that it demands no aesthetic evaluation of the works to which it extends. I have argued that, in fact, copyright law is dominated by a Romantic aestheticism that venerates originality and denigrates derivative expression. I have also shown, I hope, that copyright’s dominant aesthetic theory, and the implicit assumptions about creators and their works that it generates, are not neutral or gender-free. In fact, the trope of romantic authorship and the related idea of “genius” are radically gendered—and the notion of the author-genius as rightful owner is fundamentally patriarchal. If copyright’s protagonist is revealed to be a surviving figure of patriarchal mythology, and if the structures of copyright law were developed to reward and encourage his efforts, then perhaps the feminist must conclude that copyright law is simply “rotten to the core;” it cannot be redeemed but must be discarded. At best, the feminist must concede that copyright law, in its modern form, was a law written by men, for men. Certainly, in copyright’s formative era, the powers that it granted vested in male authors. By refusing most women the legal status or benefits of proprietors, the law denied most female authors the proprietary relationship with their texts enjoyed by their male counterparts.84 The practical distance thus produced between women’s creative practices and the market may also have produced, in a sense, a psychological distance, a space of resistance, between the cultural creativity and its commoditization.85 Regarded in this way, it would not be surprising to find that women’s relationship to their texts acquired a different hue—one that is not accurately reflected in the proprietary structures of control maintained by the copyright system. Anne Bartow captures this idea powerfully when she states: “Copyright laws were written by men to embody a male vision of the ways in which creativity and commerce should intersect.”86 And so, it remains to be asked, how might a feminist aesthetic be brought to bear in the copyright realm to challenge and change the way in which the law now regulates creative expression? To be clear, there is no unified definition or substance to the category of feminist aesthetics that could produce a single answer to such a question. Rather, it embraces a wide array of perspectives that seek, in various ways, to question seemingly gender neutral philosophical theories and assumptions about art and aesthetic categories, ideas about artists and aesthetic value, and the influences of power in the social formation of the situated subject.87 As this would suggest, the avenues of possible critique in the field of copyright law are manifold, and their potential implications are as diverse as the perspectives that inform them. So, for example, copyright’s subject matter categories could be critically examined on the basis of the works that they privilege as part of copyright’s “core,” and those that they marginalize or exclude. Consider, again, how copyright has tackled the categorization of “artistic works” when troubled by the utilitarian products lurking at the margins. As Yen demonstrated, it has done so by employing (while denying) the use of traditional aesthetic theories. An approach grounded in traditional “formal” aesthetics might ask whether the work generates an aesthetic response in people; feminist theorists might ask, “what people?”, and challenge the notion of art as autonomous from moral or political concerns. After all, aesthetic responses, tied up as they are with judgments of beauty, have tended to assign women the role of bearers of meaning under the male gaze, rather than makers of meaning. A feminist “reception theory” would instead seek to understand the art’s relationship to its cultures—the political, social, religious, economic, and aesthetic responses that it generates—rather than to define it within categories.88 A traditional “intentionalist” approach would inquire into the purposes of the work’s creator; a feminist theorist might ask why the function of covering a bed, for example, is less worthy than the function of achieving professional accolades or making money.89 Whose purpose is privileged, and when can art transcend purpose? An “institutionlist” aesthetic theory might be brought to bear to examine whether a work is accorded the status of art in the artworld; a feminist aesthetics would reveal that “work by women that seems identical in value to work by men may not be [considered] art (or good art) when the artworld’s filters contain social biases about women along with precepts about art.”90 In this way, it becomes evident, I think, that using feminist aesthetics to problematize the underlying assumptions at work in defining copyright’s categories could challenge some of copyright’s exclusionary ideals and practices, and precipitate a re-evaluation of many forms of expression that are relegated to copyright’s margins or excluded from its protective sphere as art’s Other. Similarly, the use of feminist aesthetic theories to unsettle ideas of independent creation could offer new ways of thinking about and assessing standards of “originality.” Whereas courts traditionally look for the absence of copying as the sine qua non of legal protection, a feminist approach that “returns art to its social contexts,”91 might reveal the ways in which even identical reproductions can resituate prior works, lending them “new” meanings across space and time. Deconstructing the Romantic division between origination and imitation could thus suggest alternative standards for measuring expressive worth and assessing the need for encouragement and protection. For example, feminist aesthetics, which also emphasizes the connections within and between communities of artists, might support a more relational approach to the originality determination—one that views the work, not in isolation, but in dialogic relation to the other works on which it is based or to which it responds.92 And, of course, by dismantling the myth of solitary authorship, feminist aesthetics would pave the way to a new appreciation and valorization of art produced cooperatively, collaboratively, or collectively (whether in concert or separated by space and time).93 Broadly speaking, in the copyright domain, as elsewhere, “with the help of feminist aesthetics we are able to appreciate old things in new ways and to assimilate new things that would be excluded by traditional aesthetic theory.”94 The intent here, it should be stressed, is not to extend copyright to cover more forms of expression (and so to impose more expressive limits on others). Just as the critical enterprise of feminist aesthetics does not stand or fall by proving some kind of parity with male literary or artistic “genius,” a feminist critique of copyright does not succeed or fail with its ability to extend the privileges of copyright protection to more women authors or predominantly female creative practices. Rather, by bringing feminist aesthetics into the heated debates around copyright law, we can critically re-evaluate the theoretical underpinnings of a copyright system based on gendered assumptions about creativity, economic reward, exclusion, and control.

B. Feminist Epistemologies and Seeking Alternatives There are several epistemological arguments that allow us to examine the construction of knowledge from a feminist standpoint. These are especially important for understanding what feminists might protect with intellectual property law and what remains outside the boundaries of protection. Each epistemological starting point has some relevance to the issue of intellectual property and the construction of knowledge.38

First, a feminist epistemology can be grounded in an examination of craft labor done by women. Craft labor focuses on labor performed by women involving “caring”—the labor of the hand, brain, and heart.39 Women’s labor networks people together in social structures by moving beyond labor as a commodity to labor as an act of care.40 This predominantly female type of knowledge construction can be contrasted to “industrialized labor,” which is claimed to be primarily masculine in construction.41 Industrialized labor exists within a system of production that generates knowledge in the abstract sense, instead of placing knowledge within social relationships.42 Women historically have been shut out of the industrial system of knowledge production, a system that takes place in factories, laboratories, and research institutes.43 Masculine knowledge exists within a capitalist mode of production, dividing subject from object and knower from the known. What men do for recognition, women do for love.44

Significantly, however, this introduction also suggested a gendered variation on that view of authorial ownership-one allowing for empathetic sharing between the woman writer and her female reader(s). This vision of collective au- thorship also imagined shared circulation capabilities, though not composition credit, based on a gender-specific ability to access the text. Such a view of shared yet care- fully credited textual intellectual property, then, could help refine readers' genre expectations-whether for domestic teaching narratives or other women's books, such as romances (see Radway). In this case, the "lady" editor linked her expansion of the text's "benefit" to a broader audience with another kind of intellectual labor- the gendered task of teaching young children to read. Implicitly, her prefatory com- ments connect her audience's use of this text with their having the responsibility for home reading instruction. For this editor, then, and for her anticipated audience, ownership of the Lessons was cast as communal, grounded in a common gender iden- tity and related social role, even though credit for its efficacy was still assigned to the original author.

The affiliative stance toward shared authorship that was staked out by the 1788 "lady" editor of Barbauld's text was upheld over the years by later women editors, who also carefully credited her authorial power even when adapting her text to fit their own Americanized needs. Editors like Sarah Hale, Mary Hughs, and Grace Ellis, packaging Barbauld's work throughout the nineteenth century, continued to distribute Barbauld's authorship in ways anticipating what Lunsford (drawing on Esther Dyson) has described as grounded "in the relationships surrounding and nurturing the movement of content through networks of users and producers" ("Rhetoric" 534). These women editors positioned their own management of Barbauld's texts as affiliative network building but still honored her authorial power- even, as was often said, her "genius."

Of the subjects Epstein recited in his jeremiad, feminist exploration of copyrights, patents, and trademarks has taken somewhat longer to emerge, but recently feminist commentators have begun to say something, indeed many things, about the law of intellectual property.7 In this essay I attempt to add somewhat to this growing body of scholarship, suggesting a new set of inquiries into the social roles played by intellectual property. In doing so, I point out certain conceptual and rhetorical structures in the law of both patents and copyrights that resemble those previously identified by feminist scholars in other contexts. These structures take the form of oppositional pairs that define much of the philosophical framework of intellectual property law. I first take up the dualism of mind and body that pervades both patent and copyright law. I then turn to the related dualism of nature and culture that is similarly found in both bodies of law. I argue that the feminist literature investigating such oppositional pairs can illuminate their function within the law of intellectual property, showing how intellectual property law contributes to determining and maintaining a pervasive set of power relationships in society.

II. MIND AND BODY