F orged in the United States in the 1980s, the notion of intersectionality sought to provide an umbrella name for the strategic and identity dilemmas faced by categories of persons suffe- ring from combined forms of domination. This article retraces the comparative genealogy of the notion in the United States and in France since the 1970s, and describes how its appro- priation in social scientific inquiry allowed to reformulate what were normative problems spe- cific to the politico-juridical sphere, into princi- ples of empirical investigation. Increasingly used in France since the mid-2000s, the notion of intersectionality has led to the exploration of new objects and the development of new research agendas, especially within political science.