Feminist critique rejects gender binaries imposed by IP

(Anne Elizabeth, Prof@SchoolofVisualArts, https://jacobin.com/2013/09/degendering-value 9-1)

For at least a decade, legal scholarship on gender bias in intellectual property rights has acknowledged the engagement of almost no one. Every academic paper published notes how small the field is; each researcher cites the two or three others they can; conferences feature the same key figures annually. Intellectual property rights is not a policy area to which women have paid much attention; nor have their cheerleaders, feminists. Widespread feminine disinterest in this particular form of law is matched nearly equally by its disinterest in women. Current and historic protection under intellectual property legislation has restricted access to economic and cultural viability along gender lines. In recent decades, similar bias has been found and corrected in civil rights, family and employment law, and domestic violence legislation. IP laws sit at the crux of several debates raging right now: concerns regarding women in the literary arts, for example, and the wage gap. The paucity of strong female roles in TV and film. Gender bias in post-recession job hiring. The skimpy costumes of female characters in comic books. The global economic condition of women. As women, we can no longer pretend that certain laws, because they do not adequately protect us, do not affect us. Under neoliberalism, poverty has grown more severe for women, as well as for trans and non-binary gender folk worldwide. IP laws don’t just quaintly reflect traditional gender roles, they reinforce them, valuing certain forms of cultural production but devaluing others. These values are then spread around the world through US media exports. There is no body of legislation more vital to the spread of capital worldwide than intellectual property rights laws. According to the US Congress, they accounted for 19 million jobs in the US in 2012 — 30% of all American jobs, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Protecting the IP industries, then, has become ever more vital to the logic of neoliberalism. Indeed, the logic seems to multiply, allotting ownership not only of products produced and of the means of production, but of the notion of producing in the first place. Note that the Berne Convention demands US copyright law follow US cultural production wherever it is distributed. Signing Berne is a prerequisite to membership in the World Trade Organization, which boasts 159 member states and governs overseas international trade throughout most of the world. Older, more hidden, and more intrinsic to the mechanics of global trade are patent laws, covered by the 1883 Paris Convention and the more recent WTO Agreement on Trade-Related International Property Rights, which dictate, conform to, and otherwise predetermine the bulk of the world economy. IP laws — copyright, in particular — are presently under scrutiny, and new legislation will soon be drafted. Arguably necessitated by the globalized digital age, our primary order of business in updating IP rights should be eradicating barriers — all gender barriers, as well as those of race, nationality, and physical ability — in access to opportunity. Even for those who would resist globalization. Even for those who plot its demise.