Redefining What Is at Stake: The Rise of Intersectionality in Youth Movements in Italy

Intersectionality has recently become both a central issue and an interpretative key in social movements practices, since at the heart of the processes of construction of collective identities are battles over meaning and over the interpretation of social categories, including their intersections. This is more evident in transfeminist and ecological movements, where intersectionality has simultaneously a strong epistemic, practical and political value; even though intersectionality has become a methodological and epistemic approach relevant to all forms of collective action. Especially in contemporary youth emancipative movements, the fight against patriarchy and homophobia, against the climate crisis, against racist and neocolonial postures, the opposition to capitalist exploitation and the claims against intergenerational inequalities intertwine and emerge as forms of intersectionality embodied in the practices, discourses, and worldviews of activists.

In this presentation we focus on a longitudinal empirical study that we have carried out over the last 7 years, both in the pre- and post-pandemic period, and in different parts of Italy. Based on more than 150 in-depth qualitative interviews and several ethnographic study phases, we highlight the way in which an intersectional approach arises from the youth movements in Italy on which we focused, that is students’ movements and environmentalist mobilizations. Gender, ethnicity, education, technology, environment and existential threats are no longer isolated issues, rather their intersect, in practices and political frameworks, re-signifying the stakes of the mobilizations and highlighting the connections among the different sites of struggle. From an analytical point of view, intersectionality also emerges as a heuristic tool capable of innovating the approach to the study of contemporary mobilisations.