Feminism: One of the most misinterpreted terms of our time

Feminism has become an area of adversarial viewpoints, especially in the 21st century. Often, the feminism movement has been misinterpreted and misunderstood as a fight against men. This notion is counterproductive to feminism’s accurate meaning as the advocacy of women’s rights based on the equality of sexes. This does not suggest that only women can be feminists, nor does it advocate for bashing men. Some movements, such as , promote misandry and eliminate feminism’s original intent. Initially, this movement intended to ‘’. While many were on board with this idea, others turned this campaign into ‘drawing attention to the systematic way men are trash’. Rather than shedding light unto injustices, hatred and assumptions were made about men. One particular tweet read, This, unfortunately, was only one of many tweets taking away from this movement’s original intent. This shift was largely fueled by women with concerning behavioral patterns identifying themselves as “feminists”. The negative view on feminists is evidently derived from the association of women comparable to these who, at their root, are not feminists at all.

��The Dangers of Impossible Expectations

Women are subject to many often unattainable expectations that threaten their emotional, physical, and mental health. Cynthia Nixon’s ‘’ explores the impossible standards set out to women, employing ominous, accelerating music and arresting images from movies, tabloids, news broadcasts, TV shows and advertisements. Many of these expectations are often hypocritical and go against each other. In one instance of the video, scripted by writer Camille Rainville, a narrator recites “Be experienced. Be sexual. Be innocent. Be dirty.” These are just four of the thousands of distressing expectations that are set out for women, which presents the ‘ theory. , the anthropologist that founded this theory, defined it as communicative dilemmas due to the contradiction between two or more messages. Put simply, no matter how the receiver responds, they will always make a mistake and present inevitable failure and disappointment to others. Bateson initially developed this theory to explain the psychological causes of schizophrenia, but it describes the impact of unattainable standards for women disturbingly well. Women generally being subject to the same theories as schizophrenic individuals evidently displays the dangers of the presence of these expectations. Knowing this, it is no surprise that have driven unprecedented levels of mental turmoil in young women, that These are unavoidable outcomes of the pressures placed upon women and young girls. These unattainable societal expectations present severe dangers which can only be reversed through eliminating these unrealistic standards. Let girls be GIRLS, not objects.

How Benevolent Sexism hurts us all

Gender roles have been present for as long as humans have existed. Outlining how people are expected to act, speak, dress, groom and conduct themselves based on our assigned sex, gender roles are inaccurate and exaggerated. As a society, it has become painfully clear that it is ignorant to hold people of any gender to this generalization. While these actions are traditionally and simplistically categorized as “stereotyping”, the theory of (“benevolent sexism”) is more modern and precise. This theory generally refers to attitudes that view women and men in stereotypical roles but feel “positive” or even complimentary in nature. . Specifically, ‘women are said to be “naturally” more kind, emotional, and compassionate, while men are “naturally” more rational, less emotional, and tougher mentally and physically.’ These descriptors seem like compliments, but many people are blind to the damage they generate. How would compliments hurt us? They habitually suggest that women are sensitive and weak and men are emotionless, generating a damaging offensive stereotype. I take pride in being strong-willed and independent, and I have worked very hard to maintain that. I never understood why I committed to this portrayal of myself until researching benevolent sexism. My association with these stereotypes solely because I am female have pushed me to prove otherwise. Contrarily, we cannot realistically hold men to the high standard set out for them, as the inability to express oneself oppresses internal feelings and silences authentic reactions and interactions. Hence, society’s constant need for individuals to counter the stereotypes set out for them fuels a very dangerous cycle for future generations. Ultimately, women and men should be free of stereotypical expectations based on their gender and regarded as individuals. Gender has nothing to do with how one should act, feel, or present themselves.��

��The Root Problem: Misogyny and Misandry

A consistent theme underlying each of the previous topics is the expectation that women should hate men, and men should hate women. These two ideas are better known as misogyny and misandry:

����·���Dz�·��·�Բ� /məˈsäjənē/ noun

dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.

������·����·����� /miˈsandrē/ noun

dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men.

Evidently, these are the root cause of all the matters presented in this issue. Many of these matters would be solved if not for the underlying base of hate for the opposite gender. Hate has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not yet solved one. The elimination of hate is the start to eliminating all these problems. Yes, it’s really that simple.

Written by Jenna Gulizia. Jenna is pursuing her International Bachelor of Business Administration at the Schulich School of Business, interested in pursuing a career in law.

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As a member of both IPOsgoode and the , Professor is well placed to explain why it is not. She recently presented "A Feminist Copyright Agenda: Open Access, Attribution, and the Academy" as part of the Greenberg Speakers Series. Her presentation was based on her paper with Joseph Turcotte and Rosemary Coombe in the open access journal ,

Feminist Legal Theory, she noted, involves looking at laws and legal systems and understanding how and why they reinforce patriarchal power structures. Those problems stretch beyond obvious areas like Criminal and Family law and into all the reaches of the law. IP law is no exception. If this is the information age, information might be the most important source of power. Copyright is how we protect that power.

Prof. Craig went on to talk about the relative invisibility of copyright in our daily lives. We interact with copyright-protected material constantly in our work, in our research and study, in our downtime when we're binge-watching Netflix. But we rarely think about the laws and licensing details that dictate what information we can have, when we can have it, and how much we are going to pay for it.

The key question she raised was, under current copyright law, whose speech are we encouraging and whose speech are we devaluing?

She looked at the question through the lens of academic publishing, calling out the problems with the current closed-journal model in which men are more likely to get their work published and to have that work cited and thus have more work published; in which access to research results is restricted to those who are affiliated with institutions who can afford the steep price tag of journal subscriptions; in which treating the written word as individual property ignores the reality that academic work is not produced in isolation but builds on shared ideas and shared relationships.

She advocated for an open access model of publishing, not as a final solution to the problem of copyright and the reinforcement of traditional power structures, but as a step in the right direction. Using tools like and licences, feminists can turn the legal force of property ownership against itself in a kind of copyright karate. The same right to control your own work that is normally used to lock up research can be used to set it free.

This is a distinctly feminist approach, she argued, because the emphasis on sharing and attribution in open licences reflects the feminist relationship-centered view of creativity and knowledge sharing. It de-privileges the market-driven perspective and can reduce exclusion and gatekeeping.

Prof. Craig did not ignore the reality that open access publishing may also be used to reinforce existing power structures. She repeated some of the criticisms of the movement: that sharing women's work freely may simply be devaluing it; that the costs associated with open access publishing mean it is still only available to those with institutional support; that the increasing emphasis on collecting data about views and citations might reinforce existing power structures.

While she acknowledged that these problems are real, Prof. Craig contends that they can be overcome if feminist scholars develop deliberate, thoughtful practices around citation and amplification of women's voices. They must continually question whose voices they are hearing and sharing and strive to diversity those relationships. They must reconsider who and what is considered authoritative. By applying these feminist principles in their interactions with academia, feminist scholars can reshape academic strictures into structures that support and engage their female peers.

It may not be an easy fight, but it certainly seems like a fight worth fighting.

Jacquilynne Schlesier is an IPilogue Editor and a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

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Our very own Osgoode professors and feminist scholars, and presented a thought-provoking keynote entitled,��“Copyright and the Moral Arts of Appropriation: Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives”, at the Conference hosted by the of the University of Toronto on November 11, 2011. Linking the overarching conference themes of how appropriation affects different feminisms to the intellectual property rights of postcolonial societies, the presentation provided an intriguing insight into the conflicted worlds of economic rights, technology, knowledge-sharing and cultural preservation.

Speaking on the ideas developed in their paper “” (co-authored with Joseph Turcotte), both Professors Coombe and Craig explored the concept of digital appropriation with respect to developing societies, especially highlighting the impacts of the economics-based property rights management model of the contemporary global intellectual property regime on local communities. The concept of the ‘cultural commons’ here, they argued, was being eroded by the narrow application of intellectual property rights, which confined ownership to one or a few, effectively reducing the scope of societal development by the exclusion of crucial perspectives, especially those of women.

While Craig proposed that the WWW and emerging technologies could be used to enable the public to contribute to the creation of more egalitarian intellectual property rights, Coombe suggested that the very idea of ‘public’ needed an overhaul to include diverse voices, as the term was historically entrenched in gender and social inequalities. Both authors concluded that that “a more inclusive notion of stewardship” is necessary, and that intellectual property rights will only work favorably in postcolonial societies if they work symbiotically, not parasitically, with the communities they wish to benefit from.

Professor Coombe’s approach further involved a critique of North American public domain policies as “too individualistic with their emphasis on public freedoms,” and cited the incompatibility of intellectual property rights derived from these ideas with postcolonial societies. Intellectual property, she said, was more of an enclosure to these societies, and because of this, the notion of the ‘public domain’ itself became “a modern bourgeois term,” that restricted cultural development instead of freeing cultures. According to Coombe, current intellectual property concepts only supported the continued dispossession of local communities, effectively becoming a tool for recolonization. Citing the role of women in farming communities in the developing world, Coombe emphasized the importance of vernacular property rights, including knowledge of land use and agriculture that was passed down orally, “through networks of women’s trust.”

She also argued that with moves such as the patenting of seeds, or preventing cross-breeding of seeds, intellectual property rights were doing more than just preventing innovation in agricultural development— they were denying communities the means to propagate their own intangible wealth of social history, effectively debilitating the already-damaged fabric of postcolonial societies. The answer, according to Coombe, is to broaden the existing perception of private goods and the public domain, and to ensure that intellectual property rights are not just involved in protecting tangible expression, but that a novel “postcolonial ethic of stewardship” can give the intangible contribution of distinctive groups their due.

Professor Craig also drew on a relational theory of copyright law and suggested that, in order to be legitimate, a system of copyright must provide access to various cultural landscapes and must be modified to create spaces where the process of authorship enables “ongoing social dialogue as part of cultural conversation, which then helps shape communities.” The current practice of using copyright law to put forward proprietary claims is a form of Lockean possessive individualism, argued Craig, and only propagates the marginalization of the same groups that have suffered due to exclusion historically. This effectively creates the same problems in intellectual property rights as faced by real property management regimes, because copyright law "wants to believe that expression is created in a vacuum," rather than being a complex interplay of various influences. The solution, according to Craig, lies in open-access initiatives like the (A2K) movement, which is built on collaborative knowledge sharing across cultures. Craig also pointed out that feminism and open-access complemented each other perfectly, since both were concerned with “prioritizing the marginalized and countering private appropriation,” and were “optimistic about technology’s capacity to destabilize the existing power structure.”

Tied into one of the conference’s main concerns of how appropriation could be used in a positive context, the keynote focused on advocating for a more nuanced approach that preserved the uniqueness of postcolonial societies and the “need to protect the ‘we’ with more humility.” It provided a worthy segue into the conference’s second and final day, where many of the questions raised by Professors Coombe and Craig were discussed and debated, and created the background for further dialogue on feminism and the politics of appropriation.

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Feminism along with marxist, critical legal studies and critical race theories have mounted serious challenges to the inherited western legal tradition that has claimed that law is neutral and objective even though law, from time immemorial has neither been class, gender and race neutral nor objective. There was a time when slaves, poor people, aboriginals, women and blacks could not vote; when women, aboriginals and blacks could not serve on juries or go to school; when women, aboriginals and blacks could not own property; indeed when blacks were property of others themselves; when women could not enter into contracts; when women, aboriginals and blacks could not be lawyers; when blacks could not enter a room or drink water through the door or fountain used by white people; when blacks and aboriginals were enslaved or colonized; when women and black people’s evidence in courtrooms was only accorded half the value of evidence given by a white man etc etc. Yet law managed to claim and still claims that it is neutral and objective.

The assault of feminism, marxism, critical legal studies and critical race theorists on the supposed neutrality and objectivism of the western legal system has to some great extent engendered palpable paradigm shifts and intellectual understandings of the actual designs of the law and along the way, major reforms have occurred: women and black peoples’ evidence is accorded on the surface the same weight as that of the white men; anyone can serve on the jury and can vote and go to school and slavery is prohibited; women can enter into contracts and own property. But there are still major problems experienced by women, aboriginals and the developing world in gain fully equal recognition and status in the dispensation of intellectual property law. Feminism is perhaps the most potent intellectual current that is deconstructing this area of legal impairment.

Feminism, marxism, critical legal studies and critical race theories while aimed at deconstructing the actual design of the law and the purposes served by law and in whose interests and to whose disadvantage, approach the analysis of law from different situational and experiential perspectives: feminism examines the law from the point of view of the interests of women; marxism from a class point of view; critical legal studies from power relations point of view and critical race theorists from the point of view of race dynamics. These systems however are not totally exclusive or totally dismissive of other perspectives (though marxism comes close). Further, within some of these perspectives are contained various strands of thought: in feminism for example, there are: marxist, socialist, radical, conservative and liberal feminisms and other strands that I have just recently encountered eg “difference feminism”. All these strands emphasize different aspects of concerns within the feminist framework.

While aware of the different strands within feminism, several feminist intellectual property scholars emphasize the need for a clear- cut broad dichotomy between female perspectives as a group and the male oriented��and designed legal constructs. Only by looking at it in this polar opposite way can the phenomena being examined be brought out in clear and sharper perspective. Women and men have broadly experienced law differentially. This includes intellectual property.�� While feminism has examined many other areas of the law and exposed their chicanery- family law, criminal law (rape, prostitution, evidence), property law, immigration law, contract law employment law, business law and others, feminism has not looked at the impact of intellectual property law until recently. But like the other areas of law, intellectual property was male designed and male oriented to the total exclusion of the interests of women. Intellectual property law as designed by men was totally inimical to the interests and nature of women, qua women. Like many areas of law, intellectual property therefore has gendered aspects. Each of the articles described below gives examples of this gendered nature of intellectual property law.

Burk in “Copyright and Feminism” states that the neglect of intellectual propoerty in feminist analysis is surprising given its increasing prominence and potential impact on the quality of life for millions of men and women across the world. In another article, Burk, in ��that intellectual property law constitutes perhaps the primary policy tool by which society influences the development and design of new technologies. Others have stated that intellectual property is the most potent form of modern imperialism. Intellectual property as it is designed expropriates the inventions and cultural artifacts of not only women but developing countries and aboriginal communities as well. So studying and denconstructing intellectual property is of the utmost importance.

Why is the feminist framework important in analysing intellectual property? Burk ��answers that “a feminist approach encourages us to ask not so much where such intellectual property doctrines require us to draw the line between creativity that is rewarded and creativity that is not, as it requires us to ask why such criteria was selected in the first instance” (p.5). Why is intellectual property designed the way it is: gendered if you look at it from a feminist perspective; class oriented if it is examined from a marxist perspective; race and culturally and national specific (or developed and developing world-divide) if you examine it from the critical race perspective--a perspective that is inclusive of aboriginal perspective and power-driven if you examine it from the critical legal studies framework.

Bartow ��in “Fair Use”seems to answer this question perfectly: “Many substantive bodies of law have fairly obvious gendered apects” (p. 4) as already mentioned.�� Not only that but “copyright laws were written by men to embody a male vision of the ways in which creativity and commence should intersect” (p.8). On top of this “men dominate congress {law making body} and the federal judiciary {Law interpreting body}. “Men have defined key copyright concepts such as “authorship” “protectability” “infringment” and related terms”. ��Men defined that copyrightable items must constitute saleable “property”--a masculine construct according to Burk, best suited for “industrialized commoditization” (p. 9) and this realm excluded arts and crafts which were consigned to the domestic realm. Commercial exploitation is the subject of copyright.

Intellectual property has had the effect of the marginalization of women’s work and creativity. Pollack in “Towards a Feminist Theory” covers this well in her article. Intellectual property ignored to cover areas of practice engaged in by women: food and the clothing processing industry. Intellectual property rewarded the so-called individualist and solitary productions of single actors (men) exemplified by copyright grants to authors-mainly men and patent grants to sole inventors-mainly men to the exclusion of communal, collective and group endeavours engaged in by women.

Shelly Wright in “A Feminist Exploration” examines at length how “intellectual property law may be implicated in the exclusion of women and the denigration of an artistic tradition where women have contributed: the English novel and needlework” (p.60). From the beginning of copyright law regime in England, “female painters, sculptures, engravers, printers and craftsmen were largely ignored by the artistic establishment” (p.71) and this tradition continues to some extent in the present times. Another clear example of gendered relationships in intellectual property that is commonly discussed is that of food and clothing processing. The exclusion of food and clothing processing from the copyright regime is gendered.

Pollack argues that since 1976, genderization of intellectual property has increased because of Congress’s enlargement of private ownership rights at the expense of the public domain, which Pollack claims to be inherently feminist, i.e the public domain. The reasons for characterizing the public domain as feminine are the following: it is not commodified; it recognises the communal roots of creation, rather than the atomized solitary and romanticized individual “author” or “inventor”; the public domain is concerned with “nurturing” and it provides essential nourishment by the “birthing and lactating mother”.

As these articles reveal, feminism has much to tell us about intellectual property law.

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