UCLA

This dissertation examines the patenting of biological materials derived from Indigenous San peoples' knowledge of Hoodia gordonii in Southern Africa. Contributing to feminist science studies, transnational feminisms, and feminist socio-legal studies, this research asks how differences of gender, race, and indigeneity shape and are shaped by struggles over patent ownership, access and benefit sharing, and commercial bioprospecting. In particular, it conducts an ethnographic account of how Hoodia gordonii circulates and changes meaning through colonial botanical sciences, patent law rules, ethno-pharmaceutical research, and benefit sharing. This produces understandings of how Hoodia gordonii and Indigenous San peoples' knowledge and identity are-co-produced, while new modes of citizenship are emerging.

It argues that Hoodia patent law struggles produce difference and inequality, while engendering potential pathways for Indigenous San economic and political recognition, through two inter-related processes. One is through the oscillation of elastic nature/culture binaries as Hoodia (and San identities) are re-invented through various discursive formations. The nature/culture binary is an important conceptual analytic. Feminist scholars have shown how women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples have historically been constructed as closer to nature and thus excluded from culture. This project shows how individuals and groups making claims for rights (e.g. patent ownership, benefit sharing contracts, and bioprospecting permits) deploy, disrupt, and/or refigure nature/culture binaries through narratives of indigeneity, race, and gender.

Second is through the emergence of new expressions of what I call "epistemic citizenship." This refers to the ways in which privileges and responsibilities are being granted in unequal ways based upon whose knowledge matters most to neoliberal economies. To be sure, citizenship has always been linked to knowledge and power. Yet, this research contends that lines of inclusion and exclusion within the nation-state are being drawn in new ways through the expanding regulation and control of knowledge.