MariaCaterina La Barbera is attorney at law and PhD in Human

MariaCaterina La Barbera is attorney at law and PhD in Human Rights by the University of
Palermo (Italy). She is currently living in Madrid (Spain) where she work as a Research Fellow
at the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies and as an Affiliated Researcher at Center
for Human and Social Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She is a
specialist in gender and feminist studies and adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines
legal-political studies with socio-legal anthropology. Her research interests include Feminist
Theory, Intersectionality, Equality, Difference, Identity, Discrimination, Human Rights,
Immigration Law, Philosophy of Law, International Migration, Cultural Anthropology and
Anthropology of Law.
She has been pre-doc fellow at the Department of Studies in Politics, Law, and Society of the
University of Palermo and has been appointed as a staff researcher at the Law School of the
University of California-Berkeley. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Department of
Anthropology of the University of California-Berkeley (2008), at the Department of Studies in
Politics, Law, and Society (2009), and at the Institute of Language, Literature, and Anthropology
of the National Spanish Research Council of Madrid (2010). She has been Visiting Fellow at the
London School of Economics (2005), the Universidad Taronjers of Valencia (2006), and Center
for Human and Social Science of the National Spanish Research Council of Madrid (2009).
Since 2006 she spends research stays at the University of California at Berkeley.
Her lectures and publications so far 1) analyzed the division between public and private in
political theory; 2) proposed the notion of "multicentered feminism" as a conceptual framework
for understanding the location of women within the multiple systems of subordination; 3)
developed the concept of "intersectional-gender" as a discursive strategy to highlight that
gender inter- and intra-act along with all the other factors of social identification and
discrimination differentiating and transforming identities women; applied the theoretical tools
developed in the previous works to the case study of "female genital mutilation" in Western
countries from a socio-legal, anthropological, and comparative law perspective.
Thanks to the grants funded by the Spanish National Science Ministry and by the Spanish
Women’s Institute, she is currently working on a research project focused on the processes of
identity negotiation in migration processes, in particular on the transformation of gender identity
of women in transit. Adopting the intersectionality approach, she is analyzing the legislation on
gender equality and migration in Spain and examining through ethnography how this shapes the
lives of migrant women in Madrid.
La Barbera MC. 2007. Una reflexión crítica a través del pensamiento de Susan Okin sobre género y
justicia. Cuadernos Electrónicos de Filosofía del Derecho (ISSN 1138-987), n.16, pp.1-15.
La Barbera MC. 2009. Multicentered Feminism: Revisiting the “Female Genital Mutilation” Discourse.
Palermo: Compostampa, 336 pp. ISBN: 978-88-903912-6-2.
La Barbera MC. 2009a. Revisiting the anti-Female Genital Mutilation Feminist Discourse. Diritto &
Questioni Pubbliche (ISSN 1825-0173), n. 9, pp. 485-507.
La Barbera MC. 2009b. Intersectional Gender. Thinking about Gender and Cultural Difference in the
Global Society. Global Studies Journal (ISSN 1835-4432), 2 (2), pp.1-8.
La Barbera MC., Cortina Trilla, C. 2010. La La legislazione sulla “mutilazione genitale femminile” in
Europa. Neodemos.
La Barbera MC. 2010a. Género y diversidad entre mujeres. Cuadernos Kóre. Revista de historia y
pensamiento de género (ISSN 1889-9285), vol. 1, n. 2, pp. 55-72.
La Barbera MC. 2010b. Mujeres, migración y derecho penal. El trato jurídico de la “mutilación genital
femenina”. Sortuz: Oñati Journal of Emergent Socio-legal Studies (ISSN 1988-0847), vol. 4, n. 1, pp.
34-67.
La Barbera MC. 2010c. Intervenciones sobre los genitales femeninos. Entre el bisturí del cirujano plástico
y el cuchillo ritual del cirujano plástico y el cuchillo ritual. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones
Populares (ISBN 0034-7981), vol. 65, n. 2, pp. 445-464, doi:10.3989/rdtp.2010.16.
La Barbera MC. 2011. Hipertrofia del derecho penal y fronteras invisibles. Revista General de Derecho
Público Comparado (ISSN 1988-5091).