Diversity-focused research can provide important insights about gender/sex and sexual diversity, including in relation to oppression and privilege. To do so, it needs to critically engage with power and include minoritized and majoritized participants. But, the critical methods guiding this are typically aimed at empowering marginalized groups and may “overempower” majority participants. Here, we discuss three diversity-focused research projects about gender/sex and sexual diversity where our use of critical methods overempowered majority participants in ways that reinforced their privilege. We detail how diversity-focused research approaches thus need to be “majority-situating”: attending to and managing the privilege and power that majority participants carry to research. Yet, we also lay out how diversity-focused research still needs to be “minority-inclusive”: validating, welcoming, and empowering to people from marginalized social locations. We discuss these approaches working synergistically; minority-inclusive methods can also be majority-situating, providing majorities with opportunities for growth, learning, and seeing that they—and not just “others”—are socially situated. We conclude by laying out what a diversity-focused research program might look like that includes both majority-situating and minority-inclusive approaches, to work towards a more just and empirical scholarship that does not lead to majorities who are even more overempowered.

Low sexual desire in women is usually studied as a problem, one that is located within women. However, other possibilities exist, including known gender inequities related to heteronormative gender roles. In this study, we provide the first test of the theory that heteronormativity is related to low sexual desire in women partnered with men, focusing specifically on inequities in the division of household labor. In two studies with women who were partnered with men and had children (Study 1, N = 677; Study 2, N = 396), performing a large proportion of household labor was associated with significantly lower sexual desire for a partner. Together, the results suggest that this association was mediated by both perceiving the partner as a dependent and perceiving the division of labor as unfair. These results support the heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire in women partnered with men, and show that gender inequities are important, though understudied, contributors to low desire in women partnered with men. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10508-022-02397-2.

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Many actors report, anecdotally, a phenomenon known as a “showmance,” whereby actors develop romantic and/or sexual feelings for acting partners, often in the process of portraying romance onstage together. Because acting partners spend so much time together and may be engaging in several activities that facilitate emotional and physical closeness, it is possible that performing intimacy may influence feelings of actual intimacy. In this study, we aimed to understand the association between the type of onstage relationship that an actor portrays with their acting partner and the degree of intimacy—specifically nurturance and eroticism—that they feel toward this partner. We surveyed actors (amateur and professional) about their past theatrical experiences performing with a romantic acting partner ( romantic/intimate), a non-romantic but still intimate partner ( non-romantic/intimate; e.g., friendship, parent-child), and a non-romantic and non-intimate partner ( non-romantic/non-intimate; e.g., strangers, colleagues). We found that actors reported significantly higher levels of nurturance when recalling romantic and non-romantic/intimate onstage roles, compared to non-romantic/non-intimate roles. We also found that actors reported significantly higher levels of eroticism when recalling romantic onstage roles compared to other roles. Finally, we found that actors reported having experienced a significantly greater proportion of romantic/sexual feelings across their acting careers toward romantic acting partners, compared to other acting partners. The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the bidirectional relationship between behaviour and affect, as well as the predictors of intimacy, through a theatrical lens.