Failure to question the epistemology behind the 1AC has real implications on women’s lives.

Emerging scholarship contributing to the field of women’s studies examines the relationship between intellectual property and gender. Scholars from a range of disciplines ask how intellectual property law relates to gendered social relations. Historians analyze nineteenth century patent activity in the United States to show how female patent ownership increased when laws of coverture were abolished.157 Sociologists provide empirical evidence that female life scientists hold fewer United States patents than their male colleagues and are less likely to disclose inventions to their university technology transfer office.158 In addition, legal scholars question the epistemological foundations of intellectual property law grounded in Enlightenment notions of an individual inventor creating and molding through faculties of disembodied reasoning and objectivity associated with conceptions of masculinity.159 Legal scholars also warn that patent law can threaten women’s health care, for example, in the case of breast cancer gene patents.160 This is exciting and important work. Intellectual property has become a site for feminist inquiry. An aim of this section is to discuss and analyze this emerging scholarship further in order to bring it firmly into critical intellectual property scholarship.