Beyond ‘feminist fatigue’: youth voices on relationships and sex education in the anti-gender era

This article explores adolescents’ perspectives on relationships and sex education (RSE) in Spain, a context marked by a significant disconnect between robust state policy and inconsistent school-level practice, and shaped by the rise of anti-gender movements. Theoretically, the article introduces and advances the concept of ‘feminist fatigue’ as an analytical tool, connecting it to affect theory and Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ to interpret the gendered dynamics of student engagement. Based on findings from a mixed-methods study involving 220 in-depth interviews with secondary school students in Andalusia, the analysis reveals that students’ experiences are strongly gendered. While girls frequently connect RSE to their embodied experiences of vulnerability and structural inequality, boys often express alienation, with some retreating into resistance mirrored in digital ‘manosphere’ type discourses. The school is shown to be a critical site for the construction of gendered identities, where the emotional labour of promoting equality is disproportionately borne by female students, leading to ‘feminist fatigue’. In conclusion, this article argues that moving beyond ‘feminist fatigue’ requires reframing students’ resistance as a pedagogical opportunity and implementing a gender-transformative, structurally embedded form of comprehensive sexuality education that can counter the digital pedagogies of the anti-gender era.