AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

17 Intersectionality and Human Rights: Law, Theory and Praxis 205
tion on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
and its treaty body, as well as the actions and programmes that emerge
from CEDAW, cannot fully address gender without understanding how
race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, age, disability, culture,
health, citizenship status and other issues intersect with gender. Given
the complexity this implies, how can we avoid making international law
and human rights theory and praxis unworkable? The fuzziness and
amorphous nature of intersectionality is due to the complexity and dynamism
of what it is trying to study (multiple identities and structural
power) as well as its relatively recent emergence in mainstream feminist
and human rights theory.
It is important to understand what we want the concept to do. Intersectionality
cannot solve all the problems that are faced by theorists or
human rights activists and lawyers working at the international level. It
can, however, ask the right questions about power, privilege and access,
as well as uncover the inadequacies and contradictions in current human
rights theory and praxis, as discussed above.
B) Human rights and feminist theories: universalism and
relativism
It is worth asking, and has been asked, how human rights theory as well
as feminist theory can develop coherent and universal theories without
losing the nuances of context. But intersectionality offers a different, and
perhaps contrary, challenge. How do we theorise about multiple identities
and multiple dimensions of oppression without descending into
complete relativism through the claim that “context is everything”? In
other words, while intersectionality offers us the tools or conceptual
framework to understand the complexity of identity, politics, law and
discrimination, it becomes a potential liability if we allow it to deconstruct
us into irrelevance or meaninglessness. After all, how valuable is a
concept if it tells us that one person never experiences oppression like
anyone else due to the nature of multiple and shifting identities over time
and space, and therefore there is no one theory, practice or institution
that will ever have any universal applicability? This conflict between what
Davis calls postmodern theoretical perspectives (which deconstructs binary
labels and abhors any attempts at universalism) and other human
rights theory is potentially resolved by intersectionality (Davis 2008: 8-9),
though perhaps only partially.