Biopolitics is the best explicatory lens to view intellectual property—it’s the only system that explains who gets commodified when

PATENT LAW AND GENDERED FORMS OF REPRODUCTIVE AND INTELLECTUAL LABOR Given the variable impact of patent ownership on women’s lives, developing a feminist analysis of patent law is a complex endeavor. Patent ownership rights benefit some women and their families, but not others. Patentable subject matter derived from human bodily tissues and plant knowledge are extracted from the bodies and minds of some women, while other women become the beneficiaries of such acts of corporeal and incorporeal appropriation leading to patented medical technologies. Social relations of gender, race, class, ethnicity, indigeneity, nation, citizenship, and colonialism all shape and are shaped by a politics of patent law. Understanding patent ownership as embedded within neoliberal, biopolitical modes of governing clarifies how different groups, and their genetic information and knowledge, are being regulated through such privatization. It enables understandings of how the benefits, appropriations, and exploitations of intellectual properties and patent ownership are distributed unequally. In particular, an analysis of the public domain can illuminate how women’s reproductive and intellectual labor is operationalized, in variegated ways, within new bioeconomies regulated by patent ownership. For example, stem cell researchers deploy oocytes taken from certain women participating in the fertility industry. Cancer researchers study the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations from women with family histories of breast cancer. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies appropriate indigenous women’s medicinal plant knowledge with the hope that it may lead to the next blockbuster drug. Women’s bodies and minds are thus put into service and animated for scientific production as new meanings around reproduction and labor emerge. The material conditions and scientific realities of these examples differ, however the specter of patent ownership resides within each. Material derived from women’s bodies and minds has the potential to become the object of patent ownership and control by inventor scientists. Yet, patent ownership does not haunt everyone equally. Many women will likely benefit from and take advantage of such patented inventions. Such patented technologies may be utilized in the performing of gendered caretaking work for the health and wellbeing of their families as obliged through constraints of biopower. The histories, interests, needs, and stakes of each of these groups of women differs dramatically, but a link between them is their labor. Women are performing new modes of work within bioeconomies structured by patent law rights. Analyzing patent law struggles through the lens of their labor and work enables an examination of how those conditions of labor are diverging, converging, and contradicting as mediated by patent law. To be sure, materials and ideas are also extracted from the bodies of men. Indigenous women in particular share much of the same struggles as the men in their communities against patent law rights. Histories of individual and structural systems of power, however, make it necessary to address gendered social relations and forms of labor within new bioeconomies. Emphasizing conditions of labor admittedly evokes Marxist theories of alienation and Marxist-feminist conceptions of the sex-gender system. Marxist-feminists bring attention to the ways in which females become sources of raw material in the sex and gender division of labor through producing children and conducting domestic work, which results in hierarchal social relations subordinating women.60 Feminist critiques by “women of color” also demonstrates how forms of labor and the sex and gender system differ according to race, nationality, sex, and class.61 Waldby and Cooper argue that examining women’s participation in the bioeconomy as labor helps establish connections between the appropriation of women’s reproductive and intellectual labor.62 I would argue that it also helps with understanding how patent law ownership structures such forms of labor in different and inequitable ways. I would also contend, however, that the line between reproductive and intellectual labor is blurred and unstable. Women who “donate” oocytes for fertility or stem cell research give up their genetic information, knowledge produced by their body for telling cells how to work. Women who “share” their indigenous medicinal knowledge give up their reproductive labor concerning the cultivation and dissemination of plants. Such practices can be understood as forms of labor, albeit variegated. A focus on labor is thus also meant to encourage a distributive justice approach that allocates the burdens and benefits of patent ownership by ensuring the protection of women whose bodily tissue and medicinal knowledge is characterized as public domain material and transformed into patentable subject matter. In this section, I further develop such understandings by conducting a feminist analysis of two seemingly different patent law struggles. The first involves the patenting of breast cancer genes; the second concerns the patenting of a succulent plant. Although dissimilar, each case represents an important site of inquiry for a feminist analysis and politics of patent law ownership.