From Structural Discrimination to Intersectionality in the Inter-American System of Human Rights: Unravelling Categorical Framings

Abstract

The paper focuses on the way human rights law has been incorporating notions of intersectionality through legal instruments as well as through human rights courts’ decisions. The overall goal is to expose the shortcomings of the current conception of intersectionality as it has been applied by the Inter-American Court, which, I argue, derive from a categorical understanding of group and identity-based rights transplanted from the notion of structural discrimination. The paper argues that approaching human rights violations by means of categorical reasoning is detrimental to intersectional interests, since it perpetuates the problem that intersectionality seeks to overcome in the first place, and suggests that cutting across categories is a potentially more fruitful pathway for the future of intersectionality in the legal field.