Biopolitics is inherently gendered—forces women to be caregivers while simultaneously denying them care and intellectual and physical autonomy.

Feminist science studies scholarship demonstrates that contemporary biopolitics is itself highly gendered and racialized. Contemporary biopolitics is now aimed at the individual and enhancing the quality of life. In particular, it depends upon women’s reproductive and intellectual labor. As Rose argues, “responsibility now falls not on those who govern, but on those who are responsible for a family and its members.”20 Although he fails to elaborate, Rose explicitly notes that it is women in particular who are responsible for the medical needs of their families and children.21 In contrast, feminist science studies scholars have produced valuable and extensive insights furthering this point. For example, women are often obliged to take advantage of genetic screening to ensure a “normal” child.22 Women’s bodies also become sources of raw material called upon to “donate” or “gift” their eggs for the advancement of reproductive technologies and stem cell research.23

Bodies are also governed through demands for what might be called “epistemic donations.” For example, indigenous women are often compelled to “donate” their epistemic knowledge regarding traditional plants and healing practices for pharmaceutical research. Such forms of governance may lead to important medical advances that benefit individuals and groups of women. The problem, however, is that individuals are obliged to take advantage of medical technologies to ensure their health without being given the necessary resources in which to do so, such as adequate health insurance and education. Biopolitics is accompanied by neoliberal strategies of governing that have reduced governmental support for public health care, while shifting the burden (and guilt) to individuals.24 Thus, many women are left with fewer options to care for their families. In addition, those women who can afford a range of medical care for their families are obliged to do so, and if they fail to utilize all available options then they are left to blame for burdening the welfare state. Biopolitics is therefore variegated and relational, governing different groups of women in variable ways.

As a mode of biopolitical governmentality, neoliberalism involves explicit market calculations as to whose ways of living, being, and knowing are deemed more valuable than others. Neoliberalism, according to Ong, involves “technologies of subjection,”25 whereby political strategies are designed to regulate populations differently in order to optimize productivity. Such strategies are increasingly carried out through spatial practices engaged with market forces. For example, global tissue economies increasingly seek out cheaper forms of reproductive labor by enlisting women from the former Soviet Union, China, and South Africa to donate oocytes for use in fertility clinics and experimental research.26 Thus, the optimization of some women’s bodies is at the expense of other women’s bodies. The United States historically relies on the experimental bodies of women such as Henrietta Lacks from the racially poorest areas of the United States.27 It also depends upon the appropriation of medicinal plant knowledge from indigenous women in India.28 Such practices differ and historically shift, but nevertheless express a continuity of in- equality where only certain women’s bodies and minds became sites of extraction.

Privatization through patent law may or may not occur in all these instances. Yet, patents can potentially be assigned to products or processes associated with the cell lines extracted from Henrietta Lacks, the chemical compounds derived from indigenous women’s medicinal knowledge, or the embryonic stem cells donated by South African women. Technologies of subjection are therefore at work. Some women’s bodies and minds are treated as raw material necessary for the development of new medical technologies, which may or may not benefit them. Their human tissue (with its genetic information) and/or indigenous knowledge become the subject of patent ownership. Patent law therefore privatizes some women’s bodies and their knowledge over others, while promising innovations that may only be accessible to certain groups. A feminist analysis of patent law therefore must analyze how it is intertwined with technologies of subjection within neoliberal biopolitics. A useful analytical for beginning to develop such an examination is the notion of the public domain.