In studying Hoodia patent law struggles, I am interested in how sovereign power, in the service of neoliberal bioeconomies, values some forms of knowledge over others. I examine how techniques of governmentality such as patent law, benefit sharing contracts, bioprospecting permits, and prior informed consent agreements are being used to structure inequitable forms of citizenship based upon whose knowledge and intellectual labor matters more to the neoliberal project of the nation-state. In particular, I ask how relevant social actors make claims for rights, benefits, and protection under the law based upon a vulnerability to their processes and ways of knowing in order to participate more fully within global market economies. In addition, I examine how social actors articulate, position, and rework concepts of nature and culture as they describe their practices related to the plant in order to secure rights under patent law and benefit sharing legislation.

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.