Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox: Another Man-Made Problem with a Feminist Solution?

At its goal, a feminist analysis of statelessness solutions would mean the rethinking and revision of patriarchal structures and principles which create and perpetuate statelessness and add further subjugation to women and minorities affected by statelessness. This paper explores the potentiality of a feminist critique of statelessness for the dual objective of creating meaningful solutions to statelessness and as a means to push statelessness out of its confines as a subject in law, to an interdisciplinary field in its own right: Statelessness Studies. A feminist analysis during these formative years of statelessness research, is called for to avoid the pitfalls of other scholarship, which after neglecting gender/power differences for centuries must now “add women and stir”. Drawing inspiration from the seminal work of feminist critiques of international law, this paper traces the “compartmentalization of gender” in statelessness work since 1954, identifies the persistent gap in feminist-statelessness research today, and provides research questions and ideas that could begin filling in those gaps. Through the limited canon of feminist-statelessness scholarship to-date, this paper shows how a feminist analysis can provide a valuable tool to the statelessness sector for challenging the structures that permit hierarchies, privilege and domination. Such structures, this paper argues, have been the recipe for the creation, maintenance and growth of stateless populations.