178 Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox During the drafting stages of this paper, a side event to the 11th session of the Forum on Minority Issues, on the ‘Intersectional and aggravating factors affecting the rights of stateless minorities’, was being held.49 Additionally, a roundtable was being organized for the 2019 World Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion, and was entitled, ‘Statelessness, gender and intersectionality: towards a more nuanced understanding of who is stateless, why and what this means for our work’.50 Petrozziello’s work too is a clear e­ xample of incorporating an intersectional analysis to understand where discrimination intersects with gender, race and ethnicity. Prior to this, intersectionality was the special focus of Equal Right’s Trust biannual review in 2016. The review features a testimony by Wai Wai Nu, a 29-year-old Rohingya woman, which speaks directly to the meaning of intersectionality: I think that Rohingya women face different layers of discrimination and marginalization. All women in Burma face various forms of discrimination… if you are from a highly marginalized ethnic group then you will encounter far more discrimination… Personally, as a Rohingya woman, I feel that I have been subject to greater discrimination than if I were a Rohingya man or if I were a non-Rohingya woman. It is hard to describe this discrimination because it’s not visible or easily measured.51 Also, in 2016, Sheila Menz published research on statelessness and child marriage as an “intersectional phenomena”. Menz argues that the international community’s approach to child marriage risks overlooking the problem of statelessness, which is “a critical element” as she puts it.52 In 2015, although the theory was not named, intersectional differences appeared in findings of the research project by Rijken et. al on risks to human trafficking for stateless men and women, and men and women with citizenship, in hill tribes in Thailand. The research teased out the nuances of the stateless experience by evidencing that stateless men enjoy some of the same privileges as women with citizenship, while men with citizenship are at the top of the privilege pyramid. But, being both stateless and a woman puts you at the bottom: ‘[i]n a number of areas, stateless women are more affected by the consequences of statelessness and find themselves in a more vulnerable position than men’.53 As demonstrated through the above findings, the theory of intersectionality broadens one’s understanding of differences in lived experiences. In this sense, the theory is helpful in avoiding the mistakes of early western feminist scholarship. Western feminism constructed monolithic images of “Third World Women” as a stable category of analysis and a unified group based on a generalized notion of their subordination.54 Creating a monolithic image of stateless people, as has been the case in frequent portrayals of stateless people as “nowhere people”, is unquestionably problematic and begs for a more intersectional lens. The application of the feminist theory of intersectionality is a promising development in the field of statelessness and speaks to the sector’s vast understanding that discrimination and oppression are foundational components of statelessness. Use of the theory responds to the concern expressed earlier in this paper, that without a deconstructive feminist analysis, the sector risks regurgitating homogenous approaches to statelessness solutions. Such approaches would otherwise limit the view of people affected by statelessness to a coherent group, completely void of social class or ethnic identities—categorized groups to frivolously “add and stir”. As Kathy Davis puts it, in her 2008 reflection on intersectionality as a buzzword, ‘intersectionality initiates a process of discovery, alerting us to the fact that the world around us is always more complicated and contradictory than we ever could have anticipated’.55 Disrupting and complicating accepted patterns of thinking can in fact provide clearer understandings of lived experiences. This disruption, I argue, will unquestionably foster better approaches by the sector to meeting the needs of stateless people, to raising awareness of their experiences, and, ultimately, to finding ways of ending statelessness. 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 Advertised by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, November 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/instituteonstatelessnessinclusion/>. The proposal for the roundtable by the European Network on Statelessness was shared with the author (N. Murray, personal communication 11 December 2018). Equal Rights Trust (ERT) ‘Special Focus: Intersectionality’ (2016) 16 The Equal Rights Review 224–226. S Menz, ‘Statelessness and Child Marriage as Intersectional Phenomena: Instability, Inequality, and the Role of the International Community’ (2016) 104(2) California Law Review, 497. C Rijken, L van Waas, M Gramatikov, & D Brennan, The Nexus between Statelessness and Human Trafficking in Thailand (Wolf Legal Publishers 2015) 106. Mohanty, C. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ (1988) 30 Feminist Review 72. K Davis, ‘Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful’ (2008) 9(1) Feminist theory 67.