Inside the Sexuality
Assemblage
From pornified bodies to the
re-sexualisation of everything
Nick J Fox, Pam Alldred
https://www.academia.edu/15031642
Introduction
• New materialism and sexualities.
• The sexuality assemblage.
• Sexuality and aggregations.
• Dis-aggregating sexualities.
• Example: pornography and sexualisation.
• Re-enchanting sexualities.
New materialism: concepts
• Bodies are not prior entities with distinct attributes.
• Focus upon events, as assemblages of relations
(bodies, things, ideas, social institutions).
• Within an assemblage, relations affect and are
affected by other relations.
• (Affect = capacity to affect or be affected).
• Flows of affect in assemblages produce specific
capacities in bodies, collectivities and things.
• Affects may aggregate bodies and capacities, e.g. into
a particular sexuality, sexual practice or preference.
The sexuality-assemblage
• A sexual event (e.g. a kiss, a date) is an
assemblage comprising a multiplicity of physical,
biological, cultural, social and abstract
materialities.
• Sexuality is the flow of affects between these
material relations within a sexuality-assemblage
(Fox and Alldred, 2013).
• This flow produces sexual (and other) capacities in
bodies, and hence manifestations of ‘the sexual’.
• Human sexuality is consequently infinitely
variable.
• However, it is typically constrained by aggregative
forces.
Assemblage micropolitics
• Affects in assemblages can be:
• Aggregating (affecting many bodies in the same way).
Example: a gendered code of sexual conduct
affecting boys’ and girls’ sexual behaviour.
• Singular (affecting only one body).
Example: a caress or smile from a stranger that
produces a response.
• Singular affects can be dis-aggregating, producing
a line of flight into new possibilities.
Aggregative affects in the
sexuality-assemblage
• Cultural values and norms: e.g. monogamy, sexual etiquette,
fetishes.
• Social institutions and practices: e.g. age of consent,
marriage, ‘courting’ and ‘dating’, gender roles.
• Biology: e.g. bodily attractions and desires.
• Economic and political: e.g. markets, patriarchy.
• Things and spaces: e.g. pubs and clubs, alcohol, Internet.
• Psychological: e.g. memories, cognitions, arousal.
• Emotional: e.g. love, jealousy, embarrassment.
• Ideas: e.g. celibacy, promiscuity, purity, ‘the erotic’.
Dis-aggregating sexualities
• What a ‘sexual body’ can do depends upon entirely
upon its affective relations in a sexuality-assemblage.
• Dis-aggregation of the sexuality-assemblage can
produce unknown and unpredictable manifestations of
sexuality.
• Aggregating affects can be:
• Removed from the assemblage;
• Countered by powerful singular/disaggregating forces.
• What does this mean in practice, when contemporary
culture’s aggregating forces are so pervasive and
powerful?
An example: ‘sexualisation’
• Realist analysis: pornography and sexualised
media produce an inappropriate sexualisation of
young people (Bailey, 2011; Papadopoulos, 2010).
• Constructionist response: these concerns/panics
about sexualisation reflect broader contemporary
sexual discourses concerning female sexuality,
sexual corruption, and the innocence of the child
(e.g. Duschinsky, 2013; Egan, 2013). These
discourses sustain gender inequity and sexual
double standards (Ringrose et al, 2013).
A new materialist analysis 1
• Affects in the sexualisation-assemblages of
young people:
• peers, friends, family, schools, media,
pornography, Internet, alcohol, social events,
social norms, values and codes, and a range of
singular affects (Fox and Bale, in preparation).
• These affects variously aggregate and disaggregate sexual capacities and sexualities
in multiple and complex ways.
A new materialist analysis 2
• The repetitive and formulaic sexual practices
portrayed in pornography and sexualised media
aggregate bodies into circumscribed and narrow
sexual capacities.
• These aggregations reproduce and reinforce
misogyny and sexual objectification, and constrain
sexual diversity.
• Singular affects (e.g. physical, emotional, cognitive
• interactions; ideas, novel practices) may counter these
aggregations.
Re-sexualisation?
• The affects in the sexualisation assemblage
produce capacities in all bodies, young or old.
• Porn is not good for some and bad for others, it is
a pernicious assemblage of bodies, body parts,
social norms, money and markets that aggregate
bodies into circumscribed sexualities.
• What is needed is not a de-sexualisation of the
young but a re-sexualisation of all our capacities
and of bodily intensifications not usually
considered ‘sexual’.
Re-enchanting the sexual body
• We have all been groomed into a narrow, genital,
individualised sexuality.
• We need to identify and resist the social, cultural
and economic forces that impoverish sexualities.
• To see beyond these limits, we need to re-think
sexualities - as not individual, not even human; but
as a source of becoming.
• Sexualities can break free from its constraints, to
embrace a breadth of embodied and collective
intensifications.
Inside the Sexuality
Assemblage
From pornified bodies to the
re-sexualisation of everything
https://www.academia.edu/15031642