Reinventing Hoodia

Native to the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia gordonii is a succulent plant known by generations of Indigenous San peoples to have a variety of uses: to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In the global North, it is known as a natural appetite suppressant, a former star of the booming diet industry. In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster explores how the plant was reinvented through patent ownership, pharmaceutical research, the self-determination efforts of Indigenous San peoples, contractual benefit sharing, commercial development as an herbal supplement, and bioprospecting legislation.

Using a feminist decolonial technoscience approach, Foster argues that although patent law is inherently racialized, gendered, and Western, it offered opportunities for Indigenous San peoples, South African scientists, and Hoodia growers to make unequal claims for belonging within the shifting politics of South Africa. This radical interdisciplinary and intersectional account of the multiple materialities of Hoodia illuminates the co-constituted connections between law, science, and the marketplace, while demonstrating how these domains value certain forms of knowledge and matter differently.

Laura Foster is assistant professor of gender studies and affiliate faculty of the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her JD at the University of Cincinnati in 2000 and her Ph.D in women's studies at UCLA in 2012. This will be her first book.

Laura A. Foster is an assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University–Bloomington with affiliations in African studies and the Maurer School of Law. She is also a senior researcher with the Intellectual Property Unit at the University of Cape Town Faculty of Law.

"Reinventing Hoodia provides a well-researched, critically engaged account of a fascinating contested object of indigenous knowledge and intellectual property. Its illuminating account of hoodia across a range of scales makes significant conceptual and empirical contributions to feminist legal studies and to the history and philosophy of science."—Anne Pollock, author of Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

"Foster’s interdisciplinary work on Hoodia is both novel and timely. She offers a valuable analysis of science and its relationship to indigeneity outside the context of the Americas."—Jennifer A. Hamilton, author of Indigeneity in the Courtroom: Law, Culture, and the Production of Difference in North American Courts

"Foster's fascinating account of complex negotiations between the indigenous San peoples, South African scientists, lawyers, and Big Pharma makes a valuable text for classes in law, the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, women's studies, and anti-colonial studies. It also expands the horizon of fruitful research projects in these fields."—Sandra Harding, author of Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research