ABSTRACT
Directives 2000/43/EC,1 2000/78/EC,2 2002/73/EC and 2004/113/EC3 signify a policy strategy willing to create more cohesive and integrating working conditions and to combat discriminations of citizens within the EU.4 While initiating a broader implementation process of multidimensional equality law the EU framework aims to deepen national regulations and anti-discrimination practices in all EU Member States. This ambitious goal confronts solicitors and law scholars,5 but even more so feminist sociologists6 with theoretical and pragmatic concerns on how to evaluate, balance and generally relate different discriminatory grounds, individual claims and social systems of oppression to each other. It is proclaimed that ‘EC non-discrimination law needs to maintain an adequate balance between group-related and individualistic aims’.7 Hence, as we seek to enrich our understanding of multidimensional discrimination effects unfolding between and among different dimensions of social divisions it is necessary to go back to methodological questions: indeed, we are confronted with epistemological problems as the notion of individual differences as a matter of intersecting identities does not capture adequately the systematic impact of historically constructed group hierarchies. Besides, intersectional identities could be linked to ‘hybridity’8 and, therefore, new configurations of discriminatory grounds might occur that diffuse even more the meaning of group clusters of, for example, class, ‘race’ and gender, as the most prominent categories of social inequality. As the phenomenon of intersecting identities will lead our interest in how to grasp research approaches to intersectionality, we have to ask: what does intersectionality mean and why did feminists start to focus on it? And further, in what ways can we make the most of an analytical understanding of overlapping social categories that keeps a political eye on the balance between individual subjectivity and social groupings?
