Entre los caminos trillados y las líneas de deseo. La institucionalización de la interseccionalidad en la política en igualdad en España (1983-2021)

Abstract

This thesis seeks to answer the following questions: how is intersectionality institutionalized in Spain? What limits and possibilities do the different fields of public policy production offer to intersectionality? These research questions introduce two complex issues: intersectionality as a lens for understanding inequalities and intersectionality as a policy response to inequalities. This study navigates both of them.The variety of uses and interpretations clustered around intersectionality as a ¿field of study¿ (Cho, Crenshaw & McCall, 2013), including its ¿bad journeys¿ (Martínez-Palacios & Martínez, 2017: 11) shapes the need to trace a particular genealogy of this approach to inequalities, to clarify its context of enunciation and to understand what is being expressed with the term `intersectionality¿. These concerns lead us to the first main goal of this thesis: To contextualize the intellectual and activist tradition from which the concept of intersectionality is proposed, and to discuss the dimensions that compose intersectionality¿s interpretative framework. This is done by reviewing the main contributions of one intersectional tradition, that of Black Feminism in the United States. After the contextualization of developments in intersectionality in a particular activist and academic field, the study focuses on the institutionalization of intersectionality in the main fields of public policy production. When approaching this issue, a review of the academic research provides a kaleidoscopic image composed of highly localised case studies that allow for few generalisations. The applied interventions promoted by public authorities are not only scarce, but also incipient. Therefore, this exploratory study addresses the institutionalization of intersectionality as a possibility with a scope, intensity and orientation to be discovered through empirical enquiry. This leads us to the second main goal of the study: To analyse the entry of intersectionality into public action for gender equality in Spain from 1983 to 2021. Doing so, gender equality policy is recognized as a potential space for the institutionalization of intersectionality, and 1983, the year that the Spanish Women¿s Institute was founded, is an appropriate landmark for beginning the empirical analysis. Inspired by the insights of critical theory, this larger goal comprises three more specific objectives. First, to analyse the entry of intersectionality into the dominant interpretative frameworks produced by public action for gender equality. Second, to analyse the entry of intersectionality into the process of producing public action on gender equality and the struggle against other inequalities. Third, to collate ways in which outsider resistances and forms of working have introduced intersectionality into public action on gender equality and on the struggle against other inequalities. These three goals are addressed through the empirical analysis of 699 policy instruments employed by public action oriented towards the struggle against different forms of inequality, and 20 in-depth interviews of gender equality officers and key informants. Tracking the work done during almost four decades on public action for equality in Spain, the thesis identifies the main features of the convergence between intersectionality and public action, the limits that intersectionality finds in its journeys to public policy, as well as the possibilities that this process opens. The results of this research show that the institutionalization of intersectionality can extend what has already been done, following ¿well-trodden paths¿, or it can create ¿lines of desire¿ (Ahmed, 2019) that reinvent ways of doing public policy.