Title: Materialism and Micropolitics in Sexualities Education Research
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.