Bricks, knots, and bodies: Material encounters and the affective making of masculinity

Abstract This paper examines how creative research methods do not just capture boys' experiences of masculinity, but actively materialise them. Drawing on two arts‐based activities used in school‐based fieldwork (a mannequin‐based exercise with one participant and a Lego‐building workshop with a small peer group), the paper analyses how materials generate different affective conditions for the making of masculinity. Rather than treating arts‐based methods as conduits to boys' ‘voices’, the paper approaches them as affective apparatuses (Barad, 2007) that shape the rhythms, atmospheres and orientations through which masculinity becomes legible and inhabitable. The mannequin offered a surface for revision and accumulation, enabling masculinity to be reworked slowly and affectively over time. Labels slipped, overlapped and were crossed out; meaning was continually re/opened. In contrast, the Lego session produced solidity and grievance, where masculinity was crystallised in relation to threat and power shifts. These divergent affective‐material conditions illuminate how masculinity is not merely expressed but co‐produced with method; grievance was not only articulated, becoming not only narrated, but materially staged. Situated within a growing turn towards affective and postqualitative approaches to masculinity and gender (Campana, 2015; Wait and Stanes, 2015; McDonald, 2016; Renold and Ringrose, 2017; Allan, 2018; Hickey‐Moody, 2019; Dichman, 2024; Allen, 2025a, 2025b), this paper contributes to the field by demonstrating that masculinity does not pre‐exist a research encounter, but emerges through the material‐affective arrangements that methods assemble. Recognising this shifts methodological concerns from representation to worlding, from documenting what masculinity ‘is’ to attending to what it is allowed to become in research encounters. The paper concludes by arguing that creative methods in gender and education research must be understood not only as inclusive or engaging, but as affective infrastructures through which masculinities are made.