Teenagers, Sexualities-Education Assemblages and Sexual Citizenship: A New Materialist Analysis

Abstract

In this chapter Alldred and Fox explore teenage pregnancy, sexualities education and sexual citizenship using a new materialist toolkit of assemblages, affects and micropolitics. They use data from two studies to study the impact of different sexualities-education assemblages (constituted around teachers, school nurses and youth workers) upon the sexual and nonsexual capacities produced in young people. These capacities – for instance, a capacity to assert rights to express specific sexual desires or a capacity to manage fertility proactively – contribute inter alia to young people’s (sexual) ‘citizen-ing’. Alldred and Fox conclude by assessing the wider implications of these assemblages for sexual citizenship – in the context of the continuing emphasis upon educational approaches to address issues of nonnormative sexualities including teenage pregnancy and parenting, and the opportunities for an alternative nomadic citizenship of becoming and lines of flight.