Democratic resilience against the far-right gender project: the case of sexuality education

This paper examines how actors within the Italian educational field sustain democratic resilience amid intensifying contestation around gender and sexuality. It conceptualizes education as a frontline of democratic struggle (Bonu Rosenkranz & Lavizzari 2025) and a site of societal democratization (Lombardo 2024), exploring how teachers, school leaders, and educational practitioners enact and defend democratic values in everyday practice. The Italian case - where debates on sexual and affective education and carriere alias policies (allowing gender-affirming names for students) have become deeply politicized - offers a revealing context to investigate democracy’s lived dimensions. Two policy issues are central: the introduction of mandatory parental consent for sexuality education and the implementation of carriere alias. Both illustrate how education has become a key arena in what has been described as a far-right gender project - a strategy that appropriates feminist language to promote a moralized and depoliticized vision of gender relations. While appearing to address gender-based violence through punitive measures, these actors simultaneously delegitimize and attack gender and sexuality education, undermining structural approaches to equality. Building on the notion of societal democratization, the paper analyzes the micro-practices and relational labour through which educators reaffirm democratic commitments while resisting de-democratization and depoliticization. Education emerges as a space where hierarchical gender norms, social power relations, and everyday forms of violence are contested and renegotiated. The paper integrates feminist democratic theory with social-movement studies and draws on semi-structured interviews with educators and activists, alongside document and discourse analysis. It identifies three mechanisms of democratic resilience: knowledge production, direct social action, and conflictual engagement with institutions. The study contributes to debates on democratic backsliding and resilience by moving beyond institutional analyses toward a feminist, practice-based understanding of democracy’s endurance, positioning schools as crucial sites of democratic life in contemporary Italy.