Intersectionality and Women’s Human Rights: From Social Criticism to the Creation of Capabilities

The idea of intersectionality is one of the most quoted and fruitful concepts in gender studies, provoking innumerable international debates about possible meanings, applications, and consequences. In general, intersectionality is meant as a critical, theoretical and sociological proposition, which refers to differentiate forms of marginalization and underrepresentation of individuals and social groups. Doubtless, the strength of the intersectional approach consists in the capacity to individuate overlapping forms of discrimination in different contexts of life. However, the “discrimination gap”, that is the repetition of a status of minority and disadvantage, can become an intrinsic limit, if a counter-factual perspective is not assumed. The critical construct of intersectionality can thus run the risk to remain trapped into a circular and self-reproducing discriminatory discourse - without the possibility to prospect any potential solution, able to surmount unfair human conditions -, if it does not foresee normative principles, that is claims about how things should or ought to be in the world. This critical basis can be found ex-positivo in the idea of reciprocal respect and recognition among human beings and ex-negativo in the neglection of any form of humiliating and inhuman treatment. The paper is thus aimed at arguing that the concept of intersectionality – understood as an analytic, dynamic and predictive construct - has to be conceived as a framework that is implicitly, immanently and interactively related to the potential, creation, functioning and development of human capabilities, referred to both individuals and communities as a broadening of the human rights discourse.