Re-imagining Economic Alterity: A Feminist Critique of the Juridical Expansion of Bioproperty in the Monsanto Decision at the Supreme Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In May 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its decision on Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser. Higher life forms, such as plants, are not patentable in Canada. However, this decision comforted the agricultural-biotechnology industry by providing protection for the use of patented genes and cells in higher life forms. Here, a farmer was found to have infringed Monsanto's property rights by sowing Monsanto seeds which voluntarily blew onto his farm. I pursue a discourse analysis of the sources of authority for this decision and related caselaw. Following the work of economic geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, I trace a feminist critique of globalization as a particular set of representations which have performative force: they not only describe globalization, but are also constitutive of it. By interrogating these narratives, I argue that the transnationalization of patent rights in the Monsanto decision is a particular instance where the global juridical order becomes palpable. In the affording of a de facto property interest in a higher organism, we may observe not simply another step in the commodification of farming, but also the lineaments of biopolitical sovereignty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.108 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".