Conference Program

Gender-based violences, understood as any physical, verbal, symbolic and psychological violence acted against women, homosexual, bisexual and trans* people (Educare alle Differenze, 2024) are caused by structurally embedded gendered power asymmetries, rooted in patriarchal models that affect young people as adults, and which intersect with other oppressions generating more severe traumas (Crenshaw, 1989; Walby, 1990).

Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is internationally recognized as a concrete solution to tackle discrimination and violence, as it allows to learn how to recognize, react and not perpetrate them (WHO, 2010; UNESCO, 2018), to act on sexism, homonegativity, hegemonic masculinity, bullying and cyberbullying (Demozzi and Ghigi, 2024), to protect the sexual rights of all subjectives (WAS, 2014). However, when implemented within schooling systems shaped by coloniality and hetero-cisnormative institutional cultures, CSE risks reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. Despite attempts to legislate on the matter (Bruno, 2024), Italy remains one of the few European countries not to include compulsory sex education in school curricula, resulting in a fragmented framework with significant regional disparities, particularly disadvantaging the center-south (Chinelli et al., 2024; Lo Moro et al., 2023), also due to the opposition of the so-called “anti-gender” movements (Garbagnoli, 2014; Selmi, 2015; Bellé and Poggio, 2018; Lavizzari and Prearo, 2019; Barbino, 2025; Prearo, 2025), which challenge the epistemic legitimacy of gender and sexuality knowledge within public education.

This study aims to explore the contribution of critical queer and decolonial theories on education (Lugones, 2007; Walsh & Mignolo, 2018) to the debate on CSE, foregrounding the intersections of power, knowledge production and institutional practices in order to deconstruct, from an educational perspective, those monolithic, hetero-cisnormative and Eurocentric visions that see the study of sexualities as taboo and deviation from the "norm". The hypothesis is to experiment a model of CSE that can broaden, at a theoretical level, the current approaches promoted by international organizations towards a more resistant, intersectional and inclusive understanding of sexuality and affectivity, which could be effectively useful to eradicate the root causes of oppression, discrimination and gender-based violence from an early age and starting from schools (Borghi, 2011; Burgio, 2019; Di Grigoli, 2023; Rinaldi, 2023; Seal, 2019).