Desigualdad compleja e interseccionalidad: "reventando las costuras" del derecho antidiscriminatorio

Intersectionality has been considered the most important contribution of gender studies and has had, in the last 30 years, a remarkable impact both quantitatively and qualitatively on social sciences, therein including the law. Since the introduction of the antidiscrimination Directives of 2000, that added new protected grounds of discrimination to EU antidiscrimination law, European scholarship has growingly concerned itself with the problems associated to the interactions between protected grounds of discrimination and those between grounds of discrimination and other circumstances which might not be protected as grounds but impact sociologically on group inequality. The debates on complex inequality and those regarding intersectional discrimination have enriched the debate on equality; however, they also show the limitations and the points in which antidiscrimination law is “bursting by the seams”. Intersectionality and complex inequality contribute thus to the instability of antidiscrimination law in all its three dimensions: technical, political and conceptual. Though proposed solutions do not seem, at the moment, likely to resolve instability, the debate on intersectionality has had the merit of involving mainstream antidiscrimination legal scholarship in the critical discussion on the limitations and the aims of antidiscrimination law.