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.