TILBURG LAW REVIEW Journal of International and European Law Deirdre Brennan, ‘Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox: Another Man-Made Problem with a Feminist Solution?’ (2019) 24(2) Tilburg Law Review pp. 170–181. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/tilr.152 RESEARCH ARTICLE Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox: Another Man-Made Problem with a Feminist Solution? Deirdre Brennan* At its goal, a feminist analysis of statelessness solutions would mean the rethinking and r­ evision 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 m ­ eaningful 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. Keywords: Statelessness; Stateless Persons; Minorities; Feminist Theory; Feminism; Critical Theory; Postcolonialism; Gender Studies Being stateless in Nepal is like wearing a badge that says ‘my mother is a characterless woman’.1 1 Introduction In current statelessness scholarship, it has become common to acknowledge the interdisciplinarity of statelessness research, following its emergence in the legal research field. In the previous Tilburg Law Review edition on statelessness, Manly and Van Waas supported the necessity of the expansion of statelessness research into other fields. They regarded interdisciplinarity to be a means to: better understand why this form of exclusion is allowed to happen—and why it can so stubbornly persist—and what its true impact is on the lives of individual, the fabric of communities and the integrity of the modern nation-state system.2 While Manly and Van Waas celebrated the interdisciplinarity of statelessness scholarship, they did not rejoice at its arrival in an established field of interdisciplinary studies. They contended that complex challenges with respect to methodologies ‘must be addressed if statelessness is to become fully established as an i­nterdisciplinary field’ [author’s emphasis]. Today, five years later, it could be argued that statelessness research is still becoming established, and that the desire for growth ‘into a fully established field’ remains only that, an aspiration. Tucker insists that statelessness, at least in conceptual terms, ‘has yet to break free from its legal origins’.3 I agree that a legal approach is necessary, as Manly and Van Waas point out, to ‘pinpoint 3 J Tucker, ‘Why here? Factors influencing Palestinian refugees from Syria in choosing Germany or Sweden as asylum destinations’ (2018) 6(1) Comparative Migration Studies 4.