Marjo Kolehmainen pitää konferenssiesitelmän otsikolla ”Mapping Affective Capacities: Gender and Sexuality in Relationship and Sex Counselling Practices” (ESA, 20.-23.8.2019)

Drawing on fieldwork on relationship enhancement seminars in Finland, this presentation examines how gendered and sexualized power relations are (re)produced in therapeutic practices. It applies the Deleuzian idea of affective capacities to the analysis of gender and sexuality, understanding gender and sexuality as about ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. This kind of framework builds upon the new materialist ontology, where the focus is on what bodies and things do – rather than what they are. The analysis of different 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 presentation 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.

Kolehmaisen samaa aihepiiriä käsittelevä kirjanluku on ilmestynyt teoksessa: Juvonen, Tuula & Marjo Kolehmainen (eds) (2018): Affective Inqualities in Intimate Relationships. London: Routledge.