176 Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox her analysis of “de jure/legally stateless” is where the agendas of our works disjoin.37 However, this paper claims for statelessness to be decentralized from the legal field, whilst simultaneously—ironically—insisting on clinging on to the 1954 Convention’s legal definition of statelessness. In Charlesworth, Heathcote and Jones, this insistence would be a move described as attempting radical changes ‘via using the system itself’ because actions ‘sit within a spectrum between resistance and compliance’.38 The extent to which feminist analysis should move between resistance and compliance to legal frameworks is a valuable consideration for feminist-statelessness work but is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper. It is, however, indisputable that the legal definition remains much needed for the practical application of fighting statelessness. Nevertheless, the valuable lesson to take from Lay Lee’s work is the need to reimagine our approach to statelessness by holding the deconstruction of patriarchy at its core. Lay Lee’s unveiling of the omission of gender/women from the 1954 Convention is a testament to what “new” aspects of statelessness can be learned when applying a feminist lens to our work. Applying a feminist lens or including feminist theory in statelessness research is to join in the feminist movement for the dismantling of patriarchy. It therefore provokes the question, what will further revisions of patriarchal powers teach us about the creation of, and consequently, the solutions to, statelessness? 4 Deconstructing History, Deconstructing Patriarchy Fast-forward fourteen years from Lay Lee’s publication, and the second pivotal piece in the limited canon of feminist-statelessness literature, is a 2019 article by Allison J. Petrozziello, ‘(Re)producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the Dominican Republic’.39 Here, Petrozziello’s examination of women as a “border site”, in the production of stateless populations, highlights the meaningfulness of historical reflections on gender and structural dynamics. It further shows how lessons from the past can guide our work in statelessness for the future. Looking beyond what Petrozziello calls “direct gender discrimination”, the author demonstrates how access to citizenship in the Dominican Republic has been restricted as a form of migration control, implemented via women’s bodies. This is what Anthias and Yuval-Davis describe as practice which uses women as reproducers of the boundaries of national groups. Petrozziello writes: ‘[t]he Dominican state has a policy of using gender discrimination, specifically linked to women’s reproductive capacity, as a means of limiting access to Dominican nationality for all subsequent generations.’40 Petrozziello’s findings also draw parallels to Grossman-Thompson and Dennis’ research in Nepal. Grossman-Thompson and Dennis noted the maintenance of systematic gender discrimination in Nepal, as a preventative mechanism against the state’s fear of Indian encroachment. The link Petrozziello found in the Dominican Republic, between state policy and women’s reproductive capacity, is evidenced succinctly in the Nepali context by a 2015 comment by the leader of the United Marxist Leninist Party: [w]e are always in favour of gender equality. Issuing citizenship in the name of father and mother, if both are Nepalis, is not a problem for us. But we have to be cautious while issuing citizenship for children born in districts bordering India in Terai, as well as Tibet in the mountain, through mothers.41 [Author’s emphasis] The leader’s use of the phrase “through mothers” typifies the state’s view of women as one which reduces women to their reproductive “value”—a valuable vessel that must be controlled. Interestingly, in both the Nepali context and the Dominican Republic, parallels can be drawn to the fact that while it is women’s bodies that are being manipulated into border sites, it is an unsavory, specifically male, “other” whom the state is attempting to keep out (Indians and Haitians). As suggested earlier, postcolonial feminist authors have a canon of theoretical reflections on “othering” which could be relied upon to investigate exactly who the “stateless other” is in many of the contexts of statelessness. 37 38 39 40 41 ‘Statelessness is used here to include both de jure and de facto statelessness’. T Lay Lee, Statelessness, Human Rights and Gender (Brill Nijhoff 2005) 150. 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. First published 31 October 2018 through Wiley Online Library. A J Petrozziello, ‘(Re)producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the ­Dominican Republic’ (2019) 47(1) International Migration 213. B Grossman-Thompson, and D Dennis, ‘Citizenship in the Name of the Mother: Nationalism, Social Exclusion, and Gender in Contemporary Nepal’ (2017) 25(4) Positions 810.