Intersectionality has been praised as the most important contribution that gender studies has achieved so far (McCall, 2005, p. 1771), as a result of its promising ambition to allow for more effective ways of addressing the many and complex forms of oppression that women experience (Conaghan, 2009, p. 21). At the same time, intersectionality has raised heated debates around its origin, methodologies, its relationship with identity politics and legal implications, among other disputes (Nash, 2017, p. 118). This paper has the main purpose of bringing an initial approach to the concept of intersectionality from three different dimensions: theory, law and practice. The first section will explain theoretical developments of intersectionality that will allow to introduce the main challenges the concept faces. The second section will explore how the concept was received within the legal field, and will be compared to the principle of non-discrimination, specifically in the human rights field. The third section, will analyze how theoretical and normative aspects of intersectionality were actually applied in recent decisions of the Inter- American Court on Human Rights.

The article engages with the discussions around the right to development, with a special focus on the ongoing process of drafting a legally-binding instrument on the right to development that are currently centered within the United Nations framework in the Inter-Governmental Working Group on the Right to Development. The paper explains the reasons why the human rights framework of the right to development must account for and promote existing protections and rights for Indigenous and Afro-descendant women and their communities. The first section highlights the relevant role indigenous women's movements have in the advancement of human rights law and the importance of an intersectional approach on the right to development. The second section develops the international human rights legal framework that cannot be disregarded from a legally binding instrument on the right to

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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.