This paper addresses the challenges of gender and sexuality education for girls and young women under conditions of contemporary polycrisis, understood as the entanglement of political gendered polarization, conservative backlash, gender-based violence, digital sexual cultures, and socio-economic precarity. These overlapping crises intensify gendered vulnerabilities while simultaneously undermining the pedagogical conditions required for sustained engagement in gender justice education. Girls and young women are increasingly positioned within contradictory educational and cultural expectations: they are encouraged to be autonomous, resilient, and empowered, while remaining exposed to embodied, affective, and structural harms. This contradiction often leads to the trivialization, individualization, or depoliticization of vulnerability in educational contexts, thereby weakening the transformative potential of gender education.

Drawing on feminist theories of vulnerability and gender transformation (Butler, 2004; Gilson, 2014, 2016; Keddie, 2022; Levi Herz & Rozmarin, 2025a; Rozmarin, 2020, 2021), the paper proposes a vulnerability-based pedagogy of gender transformation as a response to these conditions. Vulnerability is conceptualized not as a deficit or a temporary crisis state, but as a dual and relational phenomenon: both a socially induced condition shaped by power formations and a shared ontological feature of embodied, interdependent life. This duality becomes particularly salient under a polycrisis, where structural inequalities and affective experiences are deeply entangled and where young people’s subjectivities are shaped by continual exposure to uncertainty, risk, and moral demands for resilience.

We argue that gender education in the context of a polycrisis must move beyond frameworks that pit vulnerability against agency or resilience. Instead, it must attend to vulnerability as an affective dynamic that can become a resource for critical awareness, relational responsibility, and collective action (Levi Herz & Rozmarin, 2025a; Rozmarin, 2020, 2021). 

We propose two pedagogical principles. First, affective attentiveness cultivates students’ capacities to recognize, name, and interpret affective responses — such as shame, fear, anger, or dissonance — as epistemic resources for mapping gendered power relations in their lives. By attending to affective dissonance (Hemmings, 2012; Levi Herz & Rozmarin, 2023), students can identify gaps between norms, self-perceptions, and embodied experiences, thereby critically interrogating heteronormativity, objectification, and gendered expectations.

Second, this pedagogy validates diverse modes of action and subjectification that emerge under conditions of vulnerability, particularly relational and collective forms of agency. Drawing on the concept of vulnerability-based alliances (Butler, 2015; Levi Herz & Rozmarin, 2025b), the paper highlights how shared vulnerability can support solidaristic, ethical, and transformative forms of collectivity among students, enabling them to engage with gender justice not through guilt, blame, or moralization, but through mutual responsibility and care.

By situating vulnerability at the center of gender education, this approach reorients gender pedagogy toward relationality, affect, and interdependence. It reframes girls’ and young women’s education not as preparation for overcoming vulnerability, but as a space for learning how to live, act, and transform within conditions of uncertainty, inequality, and interconnection. We argue that such a pedagogy is crucial for sustaining critical gender education in times of polycrisis, as it equips young people not only with analytical tools but also with affective and relational capacities to navigate and collectively reshape their worlds.

This paper adopts a conceptual–theoretical methodology grounded in feminist theories of vulnerability, affect theories, and critical pedagogies. It develops a normative and analytical framework for rethinking girls’ and young women’s gender education under conditions of heightened vulnerability. This analysis proceeds through a critical synthesis of three bodies of scholarship: (1) feminist theories of vulnerability; (2) affect theories and feminist accounts of affective politics; and (3) critical and gender-transformative pedagogy. First, we engage feminist theorization of vulnerability as developed by Butler (2004, 2015), Gilson (2014, 2016, 2024), and Rozmarin (2017, 2020, 2021). These theories conceptualize vulnerability as an embodied, relational, and politically structured condition that challenges liberal ideals of autonomy and self-sufficiency. We draw particularly on the distinction between vulnerability as a socially induced condition shaped by power relations and vulnerability as a shared ontological feature of human interdependence. Second, we mobilize affect theories to conceptualize vulnerability as an affective dynamic rather than a static condition. We draw on Hemmings’ (2012) notion of affective dissonance and on Zembylas’ (2020, 2024) work on affect, complicity, and difficult knowledge to analyze how emotions function epistemically and politically in gender education. This allows us to conceptualize affect not merely as subjective experience but as a site where social norms, power, and subjectivity intersect (Levi Herz & Rozmarin, 2023). Third, we situate this analysis within critical and gender-transformative pedagogical traditions (Connell, 2023; Keddie, 2022; Ollis, 2017; Ringrose & Renold, 2014), which emphasize reflexivity, power analysis, and transformative learning. We critically engage these pedagogies by highlighting their tensions — particularly the risk of reproducing binaries of oppressor/victim and vulnerability/agency — and propose vulnerability-based pedagogy as an alternative that integrates critical awareness with relational ethics (Levi Herz & Rozmarin, 2025a). The concept of polycrisis is used as a contextual and analytical perspective for understanding the intensification and entanglement of structural, political, affective, and ecological conditions that shape contemporary education. Through this integrative theoretical approach, the paper develops pedagogical principles, aiming to offer conceptual tools for educators, researchers, and curriculum designers working in gender education.

This paper argues that contemporary gender education must be rethought in light of polycrisis and its effects on girls’ and young women’s vulnerabilities, subjectivities, and capacities for action. We have proposed a vulnerability-based pedagogy of gender transformation that reframes vulnerability not as a deficit or obstacle to empowerment, but as an affective and relational resource for critical awareness, ethical responsibility, and collective engagement. By conceptualizing vulnerability as both socially induced and ontologically shared, this pedagogy challenges neoliberal frameworks that individualize harm and moralize resilience. It also disrupts pedagogical binaries that oppose vulnerability to agency, instead foregrounding relational, collective, and situational forms of action. Through practices of affective attentiveness and the validation of vulnerability-based alliances, gender education can become a space where students learn to interpret their embodied experiences politically and to act with others rather than against themselves. This approach is particularly crucial in a polycrisis, where crises are no longer exceptional disruptions but ongoing conditions that shape educational life. A vulnerability-based pedagogy does not aim to resolve crises, but to cultivate capacities for living, learning, and transforming within it. It thus supports a form of gender education oriented toward interdependence, care, and shared responsibility, offering a more sustainable foundation for gender justice work in unstable and unequal times.

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press. Connell, R. W. (2023). Teaching the boys: New research on masculinity and gender strategies for schools. In The Critical Pedagogy Reader (pp. 332-354). Routledge. Gilson, E. (2013). The ethics of vulnerability: A feminist analysis of social life and practice. Routledge. Gilson, E. (2016). Vulnerability and victimization: Rethinking key concepts in feminist discourses on sexual violence. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(1), 71-98. Gilson, E. (2024). Toward a pluralist approach to vulnerability: A contribution to an interdisciplinary trialogue on vulnerability. Human Studies, 47(2), 261-273. Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist theory, 13(2), 147-161. Keddie, A. (2022). Engaging boys in gender transformative pedagogy: Navigating discomfort, vulnerability and empathy. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 30(3), 401-414. Levi Herz, R., & Rozmarin, M. (2023). Affective dynamics and young women’s sexual subjectivity: the case study of the Israeli practice of “attacking”. Young, 31(5), 499-516. Levi Herz, R., & Rozmarin, M. (2025a). Vulnerability-based gender transformation pedagogy: rethinking girls’ and young women’s education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-18. Levi Herz, R., & Rozmarin, M. (2025b). Young women’s sexual agency, relationality, and vulnerability: The Israeli case study of “attacking”. Sexualities, 28(1-2), 219-234. Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2014). “F** k rape!” Exploring affective intensities in a feminist research assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 772-780. Rozmarin, M. (2017). Vulnerable futures, transformative pasts: On vulnerability, temporality, and ethics. New York: Peter Lang. Rozmarin, M. (2020). Those Who Gather in the Streets: Butler's Vulnerable Political Subjects. Philosophy Today, 64(3), 599-616. Rozmarin, M. (2021). Navigating the Intimate Unknown: Vulnerability as an Affective Relation. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 29(3), 190–202. Zembylas, M. (2020). Re-conceptualizing complicity in the social justice classroom: Affect, politics and anti-complicity pedagogy. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 28(2), 317-331. Zembylas, M. (2024). Navigating the affective aspects of vulnerability in our times: faithful affective witnessing as pedagogical theory and practice. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 32(1), 125-141.