ABSTRACT
Drawing on fieldwork on relationship and sex counselling events in Finland, this chapter examines how gendered and sexualized power relations are (re)produced in therapeutic practices. The chapter applies the Deleuzian idea of affective capacities to the analysis of gender and sexuality, understanding gender and sexuality as about ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. The analysis of four event-assemblages shows how gendering and sexualizing happen through diminishing and augmenting bodies’ capacities to affect and be affected. In this way, the focus of analysis becomes not only what bodies can do, but what they are made to do. The chapter also concludes that the very relations that diminish some capacities may increase other capacities, which is central to the dynamics through which gender and sexuality work in and on bodies.
