Careless Assemblages: Examining Care and Violence After Men’s Unwanted Sexual Experiences

ABSTRACT This paper develops careless assemblages as a concept to explore the failures to care for men after sexual violence and abuse. We draw upon data from the Men's Unwanted Sexual Experience (MUSE) project, which included semi‐structured interviews and arts‐based workshops with 40 self‐identifying men in Northeast and Southeast England. We show how failures to care for men who are survivors are more than an absence, but an assemblage of gendered discourses, institutional procedures and public interactions that continue harm and violence by disabling men from accessing support. By developing careless assemblages as a framework, we enable an understanding of the multiple and unlikely bodies, affects, elements, spaces, scales and temporalities involved in shaping caring relations after sexual violence. Through the careless assemblage, we offer geographers ways to examine how care and violence are co‐constitutive and conceptualise neglect as spatially and temporally contingent phenomena that are relational, processual and generative.