“The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar

Abstract

Myanmar’s citizenship law is stratified by ethnic membership, but, on the books, it is gender neutral. Much attention has therefore focused on ethnic discrimination codified in the law. But individuals whose ethnic identities should provide them with a legitimate claim to citizenship continue to face barriers. Why is this the case? This article examines the additional obstacles that women face legitimating their ethno-national membership and conferring citizenship on their children, despite the gender neutrality of the citizenship law. I argue that the patriarchal structure of evidentiary documentation and patrilineal understandings of ethnic membership transmission shared by village leaders operating as key gatekeepers influence which parent’s claim—father’s or mother’s—to taingyintha (Indigenous or national ethnicity) membership can strengthen or weaken an individual’s chances of obtaining citizenship. The ethno-national identity of women is not evaluated equally to that of men, challenging women’s ability to capitalize on their taingyintha identity for citizenship purposes and contributing to the reproduction of statelessness across generations. I focus on this intersection of gender and ethnicity in establishing ethno-national membership and citizenship across variation in regional geopolitical environments to expand socio-legal knowledge on how formal and informal discrimination together exacerbate inequalities beyond the letter of the law.