(SHORTER VERSION OF ABOVE CARD) Biopolitics is the root-cause of gendered inequality
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]
Women’s bodies and minds are storehouses for potential patentable subject matter. They supply oocytes, cells, and DNA for technoscientific research and commercialization.1 Women, in particular indigenous women, provide human tissues and DNA, as well as knowledge regarding the medicinal properties of local plants and animals.2 Women therefore are performing novel forms of labor within new circuits of biocapital. In addition, women are primarily responsible for utilizing technological medical inventions to care for themselves and their families. Within contemporary neoliberal conditions, these forms of labor are variegated across social relations of race, class, ethnicity, indigeneity, nation, and citizenship. Some groups of women benefit from patented medical inventions, while others contribute to their development with no benefits in return. New forms of feminized labor conditions also increasingly shape men’s experiences. Human bodily tissue and indigenous knowledge is additionally extracted, commercialized, and patented from men as well, but in different ways, given the variable mechanisms of power structuring their lives. Thus, questions of gendered social relations should be central to a discussion of patent law within neoliberal, biopolitical conditions.