Abstract
Democratization processes imply questioning the discriminatory effects of law and politics, and challenging exclusionary legal categories and political institutions. Intersectionality was born as a tool for critical legal analysis and allowed identifying the multiplicity of interactions generated by social exclusion on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, national origin, (dis)ability and socioeconomic status, shedding light on the complexity of the mechanisms of power and privilege in social relations. In the last twenty-five years, intersectionality gained increasing popularity in the Anglophone academia, but it had uneven diffusion in the different socio-political contexts. The goal of this article is to identify the challenges of using intersectionality in the multilevel context of the European Union. To this end, the first part of this article addresses the conceptual origins of intersectionality, providing a genealogy that connects it with counterhegemonic feminist theories. In the second part, intersectionality is put in the American socio-legal context of the 70s where it originated in connection with the movement of Critical Legal Studies. Finally, considering the challenges involved in transposing into the legal framework of European Union a concept that traveled from another legal system, the third part of the article offers an overview of the recent development of European Union law as an example of the advancements and challenges that the introduction of intersectionality can suppose for democratic societies. The final goal of this study is to contribute to the broader debate on the implementation of intersectionality in the multilevel European democracy.
Highlights
Minimalist conceptions that reduce democracy to majoritarianism have been successful among political scientists (Dahl, 1957), strong arguments sustain that equality is foundational for the “rule of the people” (Post, 2006, 28)
Procedural theories of democracy overlooked substantive equality, feminist scholars showed that promoting equality of opportunities and avoiding marginalization is consubstantial to democracy (Pateman, 1983; MacKinnon, 1987; Fraser, 1990; Lister, 1998; Fineman, 2008; Phillips, 2013)
Using intersectionality in studies of law and democracy enables to examine to what extent law and politics take for granted the privileges of the majority group, and reproduce the exclusion of disadvantaged people
Summary
This article dwells on the controversial relation among democracy, equality and difference. Postcolonial and globalized European democracies face the pressing challenge to eliminate such intertwined inequalities and prevent increasingly more complex forms of discrimination To deal with such a complexity, adequate concepts and analytical tools are needed to enable new diagnoses, political strategies and legal mechanisms. The idea that subjectivities are not singular, but rather multiple and intermeshed, and that social sciences, movements and policies need to simultaneously address such a complexity is crucial in Anglophone academia today It was not until the emergence of Black feminist though in the United States, that the simultaneity of race, gender and class, and their intersection in people’s experiences had been taken seriously into account (Belkhir, 2009; Carastathis, 2016). Moving towards the peripheries helps to recognize the coexistent and conflicting cores of feminism (La Barbera, 2012), and sets the machine in motion to convert it into “the very house of difference” where all diversity among women can find their place (Lorde, 1982, 226)
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