Biopolitical discourse indoctrinates us to endorse the state’s power and extend the biopolitical apparatus. It’s necessary to question the powers that dictate our decisions to prevent endorsing unethical methods. Focusing purely on IP pushes marginalized communities to side, this diminishes the values of their lives. We need to discuss all possible harms.
Laura Foster, 12, [Laura A. Foster, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Affiliate Faculty in African Studies and Law at Indiana University and a Senior Researcher at the IP Unit, University of Cape Town, 12/7/2012, “Patents, Biopolitics, and Feminisms: Locating Patent Law Struggles over Breast Cancer Genes and the Hoodia Plant”, Pg. 374, https://gender.indiana.edu/documents/Foster_2012_PatentsFeminismsBiopolitics.pdf]
Law remains a crucial site of analysis to consider within biopolitics. Yet, attention must be paid to the discursive and regulatory power of the law and how it is embedded. How does patent law act as an ethico-legal norm privileging certain forms of knowledge production, bodies, and subjectivities over others? How are patent law, scientific knowledge, and the life science industries co-constituted? How is patent law employed as a technique to optimize and manage life in the service of neoliberal capitalism? These questions begin to frame a feminist analysis of patent law that opens up space to consider the multiple and contradictory implications of patent law on different women’s lives.