ABSTRACT
As a legal scholar, I have always been fascinated by the concept of intersectionality’s origins in legal analysis. In her seminal texts, Kimberlé Crenshaw has shown how the law fails those seeking its protection, if it does not have an adequate understanding of intersecting grounds of discrimination. Crenshaw and others have also shown that the lack of legal sensitivity for the combined effect of such grounds is quite selective. Anti-discrimination law is one core tool of legal efforts at institutionalising social justice. Its scope is quite limited, though, what with equality being a relational concept and the danger of equality in misery. This problem has to be taken seriously, and it is quite obvious that anti-discrimination law alone will hardly bring about material equality; it may even hinder respective efforts by diminishing our imaginative abilities. Nevertheless, there is potential in adequately intersectional anti-discrimination law, since it insists on recognising the equal humanity of each person addressing the law. Equality and protection against discrimination constitute the bedrock of our efforts at bringing about social justice. The chapter will contain the following sections: social justice as a principle of legal reform; using the law in emancipatory fashion: addressing legislatures and courting justice; the place of anti-discrimination law in that endeavour; the role of categories in anti-discrimination law; the concept of intersectionality as a critique of legal categorisations; conceptualising intersectionality in legal thinking; (in)famous early cases neglecting intersectionality; current strands of intersectional thinking in law; translations of intersectionality in the European context; current examples of (judicial) failures; outlook to what it might mean to realise intersectionality in anti-discrimination law; broadening the focus: intersectionality as a tool for broader legal reform heading towards social justice.
