The aff has it backwards. Queer communication through IP is impossible because of the inherent gender and sexual stereotypes reinforced through law itself.

IP vocabulary: lastly, examining the vocabulary used in IP legislation, scholarship, and caselaw is helpful because terminology and textual narratives exert a great deal of power in entrenching epistemologies.207 Language is heavily involved in the construction of sexual identities and desire, and queer theory “takes very seriously the significance of words and the power of language.”208 Gendered nouns and pronouns and gendered speech styles are perhaps the more obvious examples of the normative association of language with sex and gender identities, yet discursive language and the use of stereotypically male or female genderlectal descriptions construct certain words and definitions as binary objects-subjects, male-female, hetero-homo.209 A notable example in IP is the use of the word “protection” to describe IP rights or the action of asserting IP rights. The word “protection,” as indicating what IP rights do or what they are about, is widely used in domestic American law and in international IP treaties and agreements. For example, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works indicates from the outset that it is meant to protect works;210 the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) opens by stating that the agreement was established to “tak[e] into account the need to promote effective and adequate protection of intellectual property rights”;211 U.S. patent, copyright, and trademark laws all widely use “protection” to describe the action of IP rights, as do numerous court cases and academic texts.212 Scholars have long noted that the edifice of protector-protected is based on a masculine-feminine, object-subject divide.213 “The active roles of both protector and threat are masculinized—[control] and power being the foundations of masculinity.”214 Similarly, using “protection” introduces into IP vocabulary the themes of dominance and control. From a queer perspective, this can be seen as an ideological formation creating a linguistic construction of object-subject divides.215 Furthermore, a queer analysis would ask just what the “danger” is against which “protection” is needed. Is it, as common accounts would suggest, a competitor taking unfair advantage of others’ labor, or, rather, does the law provide “protection” to the masters of popular characters against alternative voices? After all, is Alice Randall, the author of The Wind Done Gone (an alternative account narrating the story of Gone with the Wind through the eyes of one of Scarlett O’Hara’s slaves) free-riding on the labor of Margaret Mitchell (the author of Gone with the Wind), or is Margaret Mitchell’s estate attempting to use copyright law to silence marginalized voices and control historical narratives?216 A queer analysis might even go further and suggest that in fact the intellectual works themselves might need “protection” against the rightowners. A copyright holder who controls reproduction or commentary may be damaging the work in significant ways—for example, by making the work inaccessible or out of commerce or limiting its social and cultural importance.217 The Disney corporation, for instance, may have a strong economic incentive to “protect” Mickey Mouse against sexualization in Air Pirates, but by doing so the corporation may be diminishing the character’s importance in American culture. There are fair uses, of course, but that is beside the point: the language used signifies the elemental values at the basis of IP law, providing right-holders with the edifice of “protector” when in many cases they may very well be anything but. Other examples of how IP vocabulary denotes a certain social order include “piracy” to describe the act of making copyright works available without permission, “trafficking” to describe the act of providing devices