180 Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox Lay Lee, who stated: ‘[t]he human rights framework is not free from gender discrimination because the public/private distinction remains entrenched in the concepts and norms of international law’.57 It is true that since the mid-twentieth century, several human rights frameworks, most obviously CEDAW, have sought to remedy the public/private distinction in international law. Despite this, legal structures and policies cannot be separated from their role in constituting and reaffirming patriarchal structures of dominance and power—laws which created and create statelessness. Therefore, it is not possible that the task of critically deconstructing said legal structures should remain within the confines of the legal field alone. Instead, this paper highlighted how feminist scholarship—a discipline outside of law—has the means to provide analytical tools with which the statelessness sector can reflect on the causes and impacts of, and solutions to the issue. However, in drawing guidance again from the work of feminist scholars in international law, it is worth cautioning that despite the considerable contributions by Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and others, they recently noted that feminist approaches ‘still lack legitimacy and credibility in many mainstream circles, remaining on the disciplinary periphery’.58 Inclusion of feminist thought in the statelessness toolbox therefore cannot be a means to a utopian end without breaking statelessness research away from its traditional disciplinary gatekeepers. Currently, statelessness is a subject situated within law. The problem this creates, in addition to law’s “entrenched” gender discrimination, is an unequal playing field for other non-legal disciplines trying to penetrate the issue. However, if statelessness were to become a recognized field, Statelessness Studies, such as Migration Studies, Gender Studies, and Refugee Studies, it would broaden the area of academic interest. The question then is, in addition to this slight linguistic shift, will the issue of statelessness, through the process of critical deconstruction, as Tucker stated, ‘break free from its legal origins’? And, to what extent can a feminist intervention address the complex challenges with respect to methodology, cautioned by Manly and Van Waas, to be necessary for statelessness to ‘become fully established as an interdisciplinary research field’.59 Finally, the concluding remarks by Seyla Benhabib in her latest publication provides guidance for the task ahead: ‘[a]nalysing the gender politics of the right to have rights and addressing gender complexities of humanitarian reason is a task ahead’.60 Benhabib’s reflections add weight to the argument for a pause and (feminist) reflection on the creation of statelessness, and ultimately our solutions to end it. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Michelle Foster, Ana Dragojlovic and Susan Kneebone for their valuable time and support on this project. I would also like to thank my editor-in-chief, my father Michael Brennan, who despite his own deadlines always makes time for mine, and thanks to Emma Nyhan for her unremitting words of advice. And finally, I want to graciously thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and thought-provoking comments, their expertise in this area truly shaped the final incarnation of this paper for the better. Competing Interests The author has no competing interests to declare. 57 58 59 60 T Lay Lee, Statelessness, Human Rights and Gender (Brill Nijhoff 2005) 115. H Charlesworth, G Heathcote and E Jones, ‘Feminist Scholarship on International Law in the 1990s and today: An Inter-­ Generational Conversation’ (2018) Feminist Legal Studies 1. M Manly and L Van Waas, ‘The State of Statelessness Research: A Human Rights Imperative’ (2014) 19 Tilburg Law Review 6. S Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton University Press 2018) 124.