Intersectionality and Sociology: Theories and Methodologies Applied to Studies of Gender and Sexuality in Italy. Dilemmas and Perspectives

When in December 2021 the Gender Studies Section of the Italian Association of Sociology dedicated its end-of-term conference, held at the University of Naples Federico II, to the theme of intersectionality, the time was ripe in our country to make it the subject of a conference, the focus of the social sciences - and of sociology in particular - on its definition and application and also the term of comparison with scientific communities such as the American and British ones that had baptised it and were developing it for decades. Yes, because in Italy its initial manifestations in the first decade of the 2000s were too few to attract the attention of the scientific and public community and, in any case, too late compared to the affirmation, a few decades earlier overseas, of an approach, theoretical framework, method and vision of society that only recently has progressively taken on an Italian, and more broadly European, character. For those who know intersectionality from having encountered it in the headquarters of North American movements and colleges where, as early as the end of the 1960s, so-called black feminism claimed its own dimension with respect to the feminism of white women and the protests of black men, its arrival in European universities, and then in Italian universities, seems to have altered it.