(x) KNOWLEDGE DA

Debora Halbert 06, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, 2006, “Feminist Interpretations of Intellectual Property,” Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, (14(3))pp. 273, https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1264&context=jgspl, eb

Arguments about feminist epistemologies are not meant to suggest that women as women will always see creative work as collective or an act of care. Women can be as motivated by profit-making as men.76 However, the feminist standpoint does suggest there are alternatives to intellectual property that can be used by both women and men who seek to escape what is often considered the only possible path to protect creative work—intellectual property law.

The relational attitude becomes quite revolutionary when applied to the “products” of knowledge called “intellectual property.” Once one stops privileging the abstract and rational and seeks out the relational in cultural creation and innovation, it is clear that a paradigm of intellectual property that creates rigid boundaries to sharing stands in the way of a relational approach to knowledge creation, one in which care and the work of the heart can play a role. A feminist critique from this perspective is a quite radical critique of the boundaries established by intellectual property law, which typically are boundaries that seek only to divide and control instead of facilitate exchange.

The applicability of these epistemological standpoints highlights possible feminist interpretations of intellectual property. If the very construction of knowledge is masculine, then it follows that the rules protecting the ownership of knowledge, such as patents and copyrights, emerge from a system of knowledge production that does not recognize reciprocity, but rather emphasizes the abstract and individuated male.77 Both women and men are alienated within such a system because the framework itself remains invisible. However, the structure privileges masculine forms and disregards the type of labor and knowledge practiced by women until the time, as is the case with knitting, that a commercial value might be found.78 Both men and women can profit from the system of knowledge that feminists argue is a masculine construction, but the feminist standpoint allows us to build a bridge to an alternative understanding of knowledge and the types of knowledge that become valuable.

Feminists argue that women’s labor “relieves men of the need to take care of their bodies or of the local places where they exist, freeing them to immerse themselves in the world of abstract concepts.”79 Thus, when a feminist lens is applied to the construction of knowledge, it becomes clear that isolated, original, and individual works of authorship are impossible—they come at the price of a gender dualism. The move away from this particular social construction of knowledge requires us to understand these underlying principles.