Abstract
In this chapter, we establish a language and landscape for a new materialist practice of research in sexuality education. In the first section, we develop the materialist approach to sexuality and—by extension—sexuality education. Sexuality is not an attribute of a body, but an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas, and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. The second part of the chapter re-thinks social inquiry in terms of the micropolitics of the research-assemblage. From this perspective, research is a machine-like assemblage of things, people, ideas, social collectivities, and institutions. We conceptualise research as the hybridising of two assemblages: an ‘event-assemblage’ (for instance, some sexuality education practice) and a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, methods, audience, and contexts.
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Notes
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- 2.
This analysis of research-assemblages and affects is congruent with Barad’s (1997) materialist analysis of epistemology in terms of quantum mechanics, which concludes that observations affect events and the two must be considered together.
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Sexualities education has been criticised as a disciplinary technique of body governance (Fine 1988; Thorogood 2000), or for being compromised by neoconservative or neo-liberal educational agendas (Johnson 1996; Thomson 1994). This approach has been influential in developing our own and others’ critiques.
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Alldred, P., Fox, N.J. (2017). Materialism and Micropolitics in Sexualities Education Research. In: Allen, L., Rasmussen, M.L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_32
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