Brennan 171 gaps in nationality laws that may be creating or perpetuating statelessness’, and I join in their celebration that statelessness research has had multiple interventions from a variety of disciplines.4 However, this article considers that part of the mystery of statelessness’ failure to break free from the frame of law (or law failing to loosen its grip on statelessness), in the years since the Manly and Van Waas publication, may be due to the lack of statelessness critique, by a discipline that lies outside law. The proposal of this paper, to the statelessness research sector, is to use a different point of departure in approaching such research and another tool in the statelessness toolbox: a feminist critique. At its heart, the goal of a feminist critique is not to simply ask the “question of women” but, instead, to problematize the status quo, to deconstruct hegemonies, and to understand patriarchal power structures that privilege some and exclude others—both men and women. The paper begins by drawing inspiration from the first feminist critiques of international law and proposes the areas of statelessness research where feminist scholarship can play a role. Although feminist analysis may seem only of concern to feminist researchers, it in fact offers a host of entry points to the issue for both practitioners and academics in the statelessness sector. The next section examines the value of feminist critiques of statelessness thus far. This is presented through the feminist-statelessness research by Tang Lay Lee and Allison J. Petrozziello conducted over the last fourteen years—work that goes beyond gender discriminatory nationality laws. This paper then identifies work within the statelessness sector that has come into contact with the feminist theory of intersectionality. The application of this feminist theory to statelessness work highlights recognition by the sector of a commitment to propelling solutions that avoid homogeneity. The article concludes by recommending a shift in the vernacular, from statelessness as a subject entrenched in legal studies, to statelessness as a field open to permeation: Statelessness Studies. The opening quote of this article, although part of a research project on the direct gender discriminatory nationality law in Nepal, alludes to more than the need for equal rights between men and women. Without knowing the context of this quote, numerous questions outside discriminatory laws arise: what is society’s perception of women? What are the perceptions of stateless people? In what way does the government translate those perceptions into policies? How are women’s everyday lives impacted by the perpetuation of denigration? How do stateless people navigate discrimination within society and amongst peers? Analyzing this quote through a feminist lens is an entrée into understanding that gender and patriarchy are an omnipresent component of the structures of society: who holds power within those structures and; ultimately, how to overcome preventative structural forces to inclusion and equality. Beginning an exploration into how and why this needs to be done for the statelessness agenda, is the task of this paper. 2 International Law and the Compartmentalization of Gender At some point in the history of most areas of policy and research, there was a feminist spanner in the works. Disciplines and methodologies that appeared to be all-encompassing in nature and therein fully considerate of human kind, were revealed to actually reflect a male perspective.5 This article proposes that it is time for the statelessness sector to pause and reflect on its approach to statelessness, to take stock of where it has come from, and re-evaluate where it is going. The means to do so, I argue, is through a feminist analysis. In 1991, Charlesworth et. al. threw a feminist spanner into the works of international law, a centuries-old institution which they asserted had ‘thus far largely resisted feminist analysis’.6 Their analysis was seminal and while the connection between international law and statelessness is obvious, feminist thought has not yet fully extended its analysis from international law to the statelessness sector. Like Charlesworth et. al., I ‘question the immunity’ of statelessness to feminist analysis, and query why ‘gender has not been an issue in this discipline’.7 Understandably, some may object to the argument that statelessness has yet to include feminist analysis. Of course, one way gender is being addressed is through the extremely vital campaigns for the eradication 4 5 6 7 As evidenced (and noted by Manly and Van Waas, 6) by the variety of contributions in the last special edition Tilburg Law Review, and also at the first workshop on PhDs in statelessness at Tilburg University in November 2018. There, amongst others, geography and drama students presented their research on statelessness. Multiple examples are outlined by Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2007) ‘Beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, and as a result of feminist consciousness-raising efforts both inside and outside of academia, women began to draw attention to the omission and exclusion of their voices and experiences in multiple arenas – politics; public policy; the professions of law, medicine and business; and the disciplines of science, social science, and the humanities, to name a few’. Charlesworth et al. (1991) point out similar reflections in legal systems, ‘Few areas of domestic law have avoided the scrutiny of feminist writers, who have exposed the gender bias of apparently neutral systems of rules’. H Charlesworth, C Chinkin and S Wright, ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’ (1991) 85(4) The American Journal of ­International Law 614. Ibid.