Intersectionality Re-Engineered: Rethinking Intersectionality in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through Latin American Epistemologies

Intersectionality has become one of the most cited concepts in feminist and human rights scholarship. Nonetheless, in its Global North travels, it is frequently depoliticised, reduced to a technocratic tool for managing “diversity” or measuring overlapping disadvantages. This reflects epistemic hyper-imperialism: the appropriation of critical concepts into Eurocentric legal-academic frameworks that re-export them in a neutralised form. To resist this capture, the paper turns to conceptual engineering, i.e., a method that evaluates existing concepts and redesigns them to better serve their normative purposes. Intersectionality, I argue, must be re-engineered to recover its political force. Latin American feminist and queer praxis already undertakes this work by embedding intersectionality in material struggles. Indigenous movements link gender to sovereignty and land, Afro-descendant women expose environmental racism as intersectional injustice, and queer and trans collectives mobilise against systemic exclusion. The limitations of Eurocentric models are especially visible in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Although widely regarded as a progressive tribunal, the Court often mirrors the structure and reasoning of the European Court of Human Rights, which remains grounded in Eurocentric, single-axis categories. Fireworks Factory v. Brazil (2020) illustrates this tension: while the Court recognised discrimination in the deaths of racialised women and girls under lethal labour conditions, it avoided naming the intersecting structures of gender, race, class, and colonial capitalism that produced the harm. In contrast, Brazilian feminist movements framed the tragedy as a paradigmatic case of intersectional injustice, highlighting epistemologies that the Court overlooked. By reclaiming intersectionality through conceptual engineering and grounding it in Global South praxis, the paper shows how Latin American feminist thought transforms the concept from a neutralised analytic into a decolonial tool of epistemic resistance, challenging the Eurocentric limitations of even the most progressive human rights courts.