Diagramming assemblages of sex/gender and sexuality as environmental education

ABSTRACT

This article explores ethico/political/ontological orientations made possible by an exploration of sex/gender and sexuality. Drawing from materialist theorists such as Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, we employ the concept of assemblages to tease out the reality that our shared world is always already in a state of queer becoming. We employ Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblages in the form of diagrams to illustrate that sex/gender and sexuality are phenomena that emerge from complex material and discursive entities—which are simultaneously biological/cultural, individual/collective, non-human/human. The implication of this article for environmental education is twofold: (1) Sex/gender and sexuality can be central to understanding how materialist and ontological considerations are vital to a politically engaged environmental education and (2) diagramming assemblages can help students and teachers map and imagine potential becomings, areas for critical engagement and political action, and new ecologically and socially just futures.

KEYWORDS:

• assemblage
• Barad
• Deleuze and Guattari
• environmental education
• ontology
• queer
• sex/gender and sexuality

Notes

1. We use nature as an open signifier that takes into account nature's sociocultural, scientific, and political construction (Russell, 2005).

2. We make an effort to keep sex/gender and sexuality together as much as possible simply to signify that both sex and gender are always socially situated, discursively constituted terms that emerge in context with sexualities (Butler, 2011).

3. For example, many organisms such as slime molds queer the definition of individual/group because external conditions can dictate whether they exist as collections of genetically identical cells or individuals with nervous and immune systems (Barad & Kleinman, 2012).

4. We recognize that our discussion of queering both matter “nature” and the human social world in this article is mired in a modern Western tradition of thought and is therefore limited.

5. As Barad puts it, “For example, a particular ‘apparatus’—that is, a particular set of material-discursive practices that materializes, say, particles, in this case—has the dual function of giving meaning to the notion of ‘particle’ as well as participating in materializing ‘particles,’ that is, determinately bounded things with determinate sets of particle properties (within the phenomenon)” (Barad & Kleinman, 2012, p. 80).