Nella Periferia delle Categorie Marginalizzate

In 1991, Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote an article entitled Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. The aim of this work was to describe the marginal and peripheral position occupied by Black women within anti-discrimination policies. The author portrays the attempts of feminists to defend women’s rights and those of anti-racist groups to defend the rights of people of color as mutually exclusive. The use of a monodisciplinary method and the conceptualization of identity along a single axis of interpretation rigidly defined boundaries that were not to be crossed. Kimberlé Crenshaw criticized the separation of themes and objectives within these movements, emphasizing how feminism’s failure to recognize racial issues led to the development of resistance strategies that replicated and reinforced racist oppression. At the same time, anti-racism’s failure to interrogate the patriarchal system contributed to the reproduction of its mechanisms of power.