More than toxic masculinities: Engaging Masculinity Assemblages through creative research and pedagogies

This article contests a tendency in popular debates and some research about ‘toxic’ masculinities to flatten complexity by describing them in terms (‘misogyny’, ‘sexism’) that take-for-granted their meaning for and effects on young people. To counter such reifications, we consider data from creative participatory youth research and an interview with a sexuality educator to open up more nuanced understandings of masculinities and pedagogies. Our analysis develops through Laura U. Marks’s The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos (2024), which reworks the Deleuzian ‘Fold’, emphasizing the processual and relational onto-epistemology of experience as always in motion, generating posthuman agencies and pedagogical possibilities rather than fixed positions (i.e us/them; knowledge/ignorance). We extend this by un/enfolding with the concept of masculinity assemblages and advancing response-able pedagogy as a mode of careful, curious, and exigent engagement. We aim to contribute to reimagining pedagogical approaches that might attune to how (more-than) masculinities are on the move, and how they move us.