Here, eyes would widen and throats would be cleared. Glasses might crash to the floor, a plane or two might fall from the sky. It seemed like it, anyway, for the gaiety would pause, and the mood in the room would shift. I’d failed to express a “healthy,” “natural” desire to grow a baby in my tummy. Or however that works. What do I know? I’ve never done it. Perhaps worse: I had offered no apologies or explanations, and no defense of my position ever followed. For what else could I say?
At the party, a group of acquaintances, tongues loosened with liquor, would soon close in around me, a cacophany desperate to prove me wrong, inform me of my own naivety, or accuse me of lying. My desire to make use of my body for creation but not for procreation was denounced in every way imaginable. The barrage of proclamations—on why I should want to become pregnant or did secretly want to become pregnant or would eventually want to become pregnant but did not yet realize it—could last late into the night. Some of these conversations trailed me for months or years and were revived at later parties, depending on who I’d crossed paths with before and how they were feeling then about starting families.
Objections to my reproductive disinterest were telling in terms of volume and consistency, if not exactly logic. You see, the real trick wasn’t the ease with which partygoers could be manipulated into haranguing me for an evening (this was too easy and, ultimately, boring). The trick was on me, on women: the illusion of control we have over our own bodies and lives is less effective and more emaciated than we’ve been given to believe. My very bodily agency, it turned out, was considered up for grabs, even among close friends and trusted associates, in the most relaxed circumstances, on any night of the week.
Through years of cataloging arguments denouncing my desire to remain childless, I saw certain patterns emerge. The most glaring posited that I had accrued some form of social debt that required repayment. The foundation of this stance wasn’t that I would “make a good mother” (no one ever suggested that I would) or that an additional child would somehow be of benefit to “the community” (for babies, in my circle, are not so rare). Rather, it was that I might “owe it”—to society, to my family, to my ancestors, to “my people”—to reproduce.
Those of us who navigate the world as women often encounter such hidden riders in the social contract, just as do nonbinary people, and even men, whether we acknowledge these expectations or not. For gender is a form of debt bondage: we agree to perform the labor of femininity or masculinity or both or neither. In exchange, we are offered certain compensation. What forms those rewards take, the conditions under which they are withheld, whether anyone truly owes anything to society in exchange for them, and toward what end the original agreement was negotiated and by whom are all worthy questions and deserving of an essay of their own. Here we will approach them only obliquely.
Let’s focus now on how expectations of motherhood as the most appropriate form of productive contribution are often made explicit once someone read as female states a disinterest in bearing children. I’m certainly not the only ciswoman who has faced the bizarre charge that I am wrong to want what I want—or, more exactly, that I am wrong to not want to do with my body what I do not want to do with it. That bodily desire can be labeled as wrong is a foundation of homophobia, racism, transphobia, ageism, and ableism as well as misogyny, but here we set the limits of our inquisition by the role I assumed at parties—that of a well-educated, upper-middle-class white woman with no evident physical malfunction; I cannot speak of any other experience.
There are, of course, plenty of others like me. The point of this essay is that an overeducated mind in a healthy-appearing, young, white body replete with feminine markers (in my case, more glitter and skirts than ample breasts or hips) and upper-middle-class bearing (classy glitter and knee-length skirts1) is instilled with the message that she owes it to society to reproduce. Women like me, we’re told—by grade-school teachers and college professors, church parishioners, friends in school, dinner party companions, or people we meet in the grocery store—are “well-bred” or “of good stock,” and our obligation to procreate rests in part on the notion that we would raise the “right kind” of children. Judgments such as these stem from a particular mindset born of a particular context. In my case, perceived race, perceived education, and perceived class status mark me to some as the correct type of person to populate the planet. These exact phrases—“well-bred,” “good stock,” “right kind,” “populate”—have frequently been used to outline my responsibilities as an American woman. It is only now, in writing them down, that I can fully acknowledge them as extremely problematic.
I should note that my disinterest in procreation to be a form of privilege. Children are not necessary to my survival, and I can, medically and legally, ensure that I will not have them. I live in a time and place where, although it is an economic challenge to remain unmarried, it is not impossible, and as an independent woman, I have no partner’s desires to consider as I pursue my own definition of “family.”
However, it must be stressed that pressures on me to bear children often appear to spring from a desire to shore up and extend the limits of this privilege to pass along to future generations imagined to emanate from my womb. This is a flattering but insidious form of elitism, class bias, and ableism, but most clearly I believe it to be rooted in—if not a fundamental mechanism of—white supremacy.
It begins to seem possible to measure the value of my imaginary child, whose worth may rival or best my own, inclusive of my social and cultural contributions. For when presented with a future in which I must choose between bearing offspring and doing what I professed to enjoy at the time—writing, creating art, and traveling—I have invariably been urged to choose the former.
What makes this remarkable is that I am a reasonably well-respected (if modestly compensated) cultural producer, by which I mean that my livelihood and vocation are to create things that reflect the world as I see it, and I am allowed to do so because the work seems to hold value for people, who support me in creating it. Yet when the notion of children arises—I cannot call it a question, because for me it’s never been one—my life’s labor is relegated to prelude, the sideshow act before the main attraction: an imaginary child. The message seems to be that I’ve exhausted my individual worth on the countless zines, articles, magazines, and authored and edited books I’ve produced (I don’t even know how many total literary projects I’ve completed), so now it’s time to settle down and get serious.
Except I have always been serious, have always known what I wanted, and was never swayed by anyone’s suggestions regarding why I might be mistaken. Oh, I was still appalled by the arguments: the demand that I contribute to society invalidates what I may have already contributed to society, or whatever potential I felt at an earlier age I may have had to contribute to society eventually. That debt has been paaaaiiiiiiddddd, I thought, every time someone suggested to me anew that perhaps I might think about the next generation. (I’ve written several books for young people, and several more about my work with young people.) But the mechanisms of debt are insidious: a month after paying off a credit card in full, you will always get another bill reflecting the interest accrued between the time your payment was sent and the moment it was received, plus the interest accrued on that total during the time you were sitting around thinking your account was clear. By then, you may owe a couple hundred dollars, basically for your own hubris in believing yourself to be debt-free.
What I have come to understand is that instilled in the agreement to perform womanhood, or perhaps all of femininity, is an expected desire to be reproductive, even if one has already staked a claim for oneself as productive. Creating things outside of the body may be seen as preparatory to creating something inside the body: that no matter what one has experienced in the public realm, a woman should eventually retreat into the private domain, for it is her rightful place. You have done a good many things in the world and your work is strong, some partygo
er or another always noted earnestly after I expressed my disinterest in having kids. But wasn’t it time to do something meaningful?
The line between society and culture is often indistinct, but I am under no delusions that culture is anything more than the messy material byproduct of people living in the world together and interacting socially—in fact, of society itself. So while culture may inspire many, often conflicting, definitions, the value granted cultural products in the United States is fairly straightforward. It is codified in a body of policy known as intellectual property, or IP, rights—laws that allow for economic, although not exclusively financial, gains and losses from the production of objects.
Consisting of trademark, patent, and copyright law, IP divides cultural production in the following manner: industrial language and methodologies are the domain of trademark law; scientific and design inventions are covered by patent law; and artistic creations are outlined in copyright law. Through a web of protections we consider rights, intellectual property is a primary conduit for the flow of capital around the world, the framework within which the trade in goods takes place. Yet what is protected under IP law is very specific: the tangible expression of an idea—the form—and not the idea itself. This is significant, and its ties to trade ultimately cannot be ignored: IP governs things and the ways they are made, because objects can bear price tags. Indeed, the clearly stated goal of IP law, as UC Davis legal scholar Madhavi Sunder writes, “is to promote the invention of more machines, from the Blackberry to the iPod, and more intellectual products, from Mickey Mouse to R2D2.” The focus on the dissemination of tangible goods has a social and cultural effect, she argues in From Goods to a Good Life, her look at the interpersonal reverberations of IP policy.2
Believe it or not, the human implications of object-based legislation are vast. Take for example the gulf between an idea and its expression—the period before which a concept is made tangible, before IP law can offer any protection. It’s often called a pregnant space, or a space of gestation. (Creators awaiting copyright protection, inventors applying for patents, and businesspeople eligible for trademarks alike use terms like “birthing” and “baby” to describe pending projects.) This anthropomorphizing language matters. Particularly in IP law, where some potential forms of expression are wrangled into products and offered protection, while others are not. IP laws do not protect all potential expressions of ideas, in other words; they protect only the rights to certain ideas, when expressed in particular forms, and for the most part, when expressed by particular people. The equivalency between product-creation and childbirth adopted in artistic, business, and scientific realms is no coincidence: IP laws and the manner in which they are applied tend to be quite gendered.
Copyrights, for example, cover creative expression within certain artistic mediums, the list of which reflects the historic roles of men as breadwinners and women as homemakers, as well as the cultural value of work created in each of these realms and for each implied audience. So while traditionally masculine forms of cultural production such as sculpture, filmmaking, and architecture are all copyright eligible, traditionally feminine forms of cultural production including food preparation, garment creation, and quilting (considered domestic labor, because the products created are often intended for use in the home) are generally not. Patents, too, are offered more masculine players than feminine players: in 2012, the National Bureau of Economic Research found only 7.5 percent of all patent holders to be female, a figure that shrinks to 5.5 percent for holders of commercial patents. Not surprisingly, incidents of gender bias in patent application and approval processes are common and some quite blatant—as in the long history of patent lawyers who would take ownership of female applicants’ patents in lieu of fees. (Trademarks, which protect brand names and business practices, are gendered, too—they cover products from which an overwhelmingly male group of CEOs profit—but because they are more specialized, do not figure strongly in this discussion.)
The gendered presumptions on which IP laws rest, I believe, play a significant role in the sense that women may owe some kind of debt to society. The truth is that my determination not to reproduce was met with a nearly despotic intolerance that did not waver with shifts in presiding politics or economics. I believe that the reason my prioritization of a productive role over a reproductive one was so roundly rejected is related to why and how IP laws were gendered in the first place, and how they have evolved since. My suspicion is that intellectual property rights work not only descriptively, defining traditional creator roles, but also prescriptively, consigning feminine players to one form of production and masculine players to another.
Echoing a concern of Sunder’s, we might ask, how does a body of law that governs the production of things come to operate in relationships between humans? Of course capitalism, the economic system under which we operate, establishes a market to allow for survival through the trade of things. We—understandably—become emotionally invested in retaining the ability to have things available for trade or sale, since our survival seemingly depends on it. This ever-expanding market is where we buy in, literally, to the logic of legislation that governs the ownership of productive practices—federal policy as individually held values system.
There is no question that we may retain certain beliefs even in the face of evidence that they do not hold true. The productive drive is, at this moment, capitalism’s most overbearing quality: the manufacture of clothing, food, and data in the United States has already far outpaced our desire for or ability to consume same. Yet rarely do we question the need to produce more, or to be productive at all, and concerns that do arise about overproduction are quickly silenced by the accepted truth that economic security—for individuals and for the nation—relies on producing things. Stalled production under this values system is an indication of weakness, but failure to produce appears to be read as something far worse.
This is where the space we have described as pregnant between an idea and its tangible expression becomes most significant. In IP terms, women who express no desire to birth children are unprotectable because there is no potential expression of this idea: nothing is produced. (Men who express no desire to raise children have many other sanctioned means of production to fall back on.) While capitalism might simply mark the absence with a big, fat zero, the values system incorporated by humans living under an ever-expanding market logic seems to identify it as a threat: a black hole of potential, horror vacui to be warded off at every turn. Under capitalism, then, when one expresses a desire not to produce—whether on the production line or in the bedroom—one abdicates one’s interest in protection. One proclaims oneself, it seems, valueless.
The implications of this extend well beyond my diminished capacity to escape a cocktail party without catching a drink in the face: they can be seen in the regular repeal of federal abortion and reproductive healthcare laws with glaring acuity. Politicians seem to unanimously agree that women’s reproductive value must be secured for the good of the entire nation. Forget the myth of the biological imperative. The imperative to bear children seems to be cultural.
The House Committee Reports on the Patent Act of 1952 declares “anything under the sun that is made by man” as its mandate of protection. Indeed, since the precursors of modern patents in sixth-century Europe (litterae patents, Latin for “open letters”) up until quite recently, this description of the domain of patents—the driving force of the American economy—remained apt.
Originally official documents that granted privileges to their holders, early patents were especially useful to aid the exploration of foreign lands. As globalization scholar Vandana Shiva writes in her 2001 book Protect or Plunder? Understanding Intellectual Property Rights, patents were originally used “for colonization and for establishing import monopolies.”3 The more modern notion of patents, as pertaining to the realm of idea-fostered objects and systems, emerged nearly a thousand years later in Renaissance Italy. At that time, the “novelt
y” of a device was figured regionally—in this case, in the Venetian domain—as well as based on the stature, or visibility, of the patent seeker within it. Uniqueness of a creation was less prized than its availability, so one did not need to “invent” a device to obtain an early patent; one needed only to manufacture a device that no one else within eyesight was already making.
In our contemporary, globalized world, of course, patent law is often used, alongside other IP and trade agreements, to dissuade local creation of a preexisting invention in what is usually called patent or IP infringement. Arguably the same distinction is at work, a legal framework that simply shifted allegiance as economic power centralized over time. Shiva also suggests that the early encouragement of technology transfer throughout the world was eventually replaced by a regime that prevents the global transfer of technology, but she makes clear that fluid definitions of creativity and technology have always disadvantaged certain actors. When patents came to the United States, for example, they were written to benefit US players. Under Connecticut law, “invention” was defined as “bringing in the supply of goods from foreign parts, that is not as yet of use among us.”4 Only later were import patents distinguished from patents of invention. Until then, finders were not only keepers, legally speaking. They were also creators.
The ambivalence in early IP law between what is created and what is found—the distinction between what is made versus what has merely been located and sited to a source discounted in some manner—highlights interesting economic incentives hidden in patent law to encourage ignorance, travel, and self-promotion. Multiple patents were awarded around the world in the late 1700s, for example, for steamship creation, use, and travelways, and a smart “inventor” could make a good go of business simply remaking the creations of others, domestically. (The sheer number of patents assigned to pre-existing inventions would testify to the likelihood that this happened quite frequently.) The ability to patent what has already been invented elsewhere offers financial benefits for the public life often granted masculine players but denied feminine ones. This is true in practice, certainly, if it is not inscribed directly into the law: women at the beginning of the 1800s stood a one in eight chance of dying in childbirth and bore an average of seven children in their lifetimes. Married women with the financial means to travel were surprisingly unlikely even to be able to get out of bed, much less locate a foreign invention to produce back home.
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