ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what is gained in a sociology of sexuality that applies a materialist and posthuman perspective. It establishes a Deleuze-inspired language of sexuality using the concepts of 'assemblage', 'affect', 'productive desire' and 'territorialisation'. The chapter re-thinks conceptions such as sexual desire, sexual response, sexual preferences, sexual codes of conduct, sexual identity and sexuality itself. The chapter establishes a language and landscape for a materialist 'sexuality-assemblage'; and uses this understanding of sexuality to explore some empirical data on the sexuality-assemblages of young men. 'New' materialism has emerged over the past 20 years as an approach concerned fundamentally with the material workings of power, but focused firmly upon social production rather than social construction. The micropolitics of sexuality-assemblage is key to a materialist analysis of sexuality, and the chapter attends briefly to two DeleuzoGuattarian conceptions of how assemblage micropolitics work: 'territorialisation' and 'aggregation'.
