Brennan 177 In Petrozziello’s conclusions on her research, she highlights the work of feminist migration/geography scholar, Rachel Silvey, who concluded that women’s reproductive capacities are used as a border site to be controlled by states. Petrozziello’s linkage to Silvey’s work shows the usefulness of feminist theory in working through issues by moving across disciplines, in this case, across law, geography and migration. Furthermore, these conclusions show how the friction between state control and reproductive justice is another interesting and important point through which, feminist research can penetrate statelessness. The fight for reproductive justice is almost never an event. Rather, it is a continuous process in feminist research and advocacy,42 a process which should therefore also be incorporated into the evolution of stateless research. Petrozziello reaches her conclusions on indirect forms of gender discrimination by researching migrant women’s history in the Dominican Republic, from the time of the rise of the sugar cane industry. She carefully carves out the multiple ways in which women were overlooked as subjects, both politically and socially. Petrozziello shows how the Dominican Republic failed to issue Haitian migrant women with work permits: ‘[i]n the labour migration contracts [women] are neither counted nor registered by the state as workers’.43 To borrow the phrase from the 1954 Convention, “women’s work” was not recognized as work and therefore women arriving in the Dominican Republic from Haiti in the early twentieth century were not issued with documentation. Given this, Petrozziello’s research situates gender discrimination at its intersections with historical civil registry implementation practices, and not simply discrimination that is inscribed in law:44 ‘[t]he links between gender and statelessness are indeed legal—but also historical, structural, political and procedural’.45 Petrozziello’s mapping out of the socio-economic position of women of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic revealed that the creation of statelessness was not a technical hiccup, but a “strategy of slippery statecraft”.46 By exploring historical gender dynamics across state policy, practice, and in the case of the Dominican Republic, local industry, Petrozziello vigilantly exposes how the exclusion and mistreatment of migrant women created and propagates statelessness. This is the type of research that was referenced to earlier in this paper as the pause and reflect stage of feminist-statelessness research. With this nuanced understanding of statelessness in the Dominican Republic, Petrozziello is then able to suggest new approaches to statelessness solutions that include adopting ‘a broader interpretation of the relationship between gender and statelessness’.47 Petrozziello’s work is an excellent embodiment of rethinking and decompartmentalizing gender and power dynamics in statelessness research. 5 Intersectionality Between Lay Lee’s research in 2005 and Petrozziello’s in 2019, the lack of publications citing the nexus between feminist theory and statelessness is striking. However, within this period there is a noticeable increase in the awareness and application of an intersectional approach to statelessness. Kimberlé Crenshaw was the first person to use the word “intersectionality” in a feminist context. Intersectionality was C ­ renshaw’s pivotal critique of ‘the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’.48 As shown in the section that follows, statelessness research has adopted Crenshaw’s critique to understand multiple modes of oppression operating in conjunction with citizenship status (e.g. (dis)ability, age, sexuality, class, caste, ethnicity, gender etc.). 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 This is evidenced under the Trump administration in the United States in the roll back on the Obama-era birth control mandate, the promises to defund Planned Parenthood and the attempts to limit access to abortions. Glenza, J. “Abortion rights in ‘dire, immediate danger’ as Anthony Kennedy retires” 2018 The Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/27/abortion-rights-immediate-danger-anthony-kennedy-retires>. A J Petrozziello, ‘(Re)producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the ­Dominican Republic’ (2019) 47(1) International Migration 218. As highlighted by Petrozziello (2019 215) see also, B L Fisher, ‘Gender Discrimination and Statelessness in the Gulf Cooperation Council States’ (2016) 23(2) Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 269. A J Petrozziello, ‘(Re)producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the ­Dominican Republic’ (2019) 47(1) International Migration 223. Ibid 224. Ibid 223. K Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ (1989) University of Chicago Legal Forum 139.