Overempowered? Diversity-Focused Research with Gender/Sex and Sexual Majorities

Abstract

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.

Feminist and queer science: Principles for research with gender, sex, and sexuality in psychology and beyond.

“…Feminist and queer methodologies often attend to marginalization and try to minimize the disempowering impact of science on minoritized groups, in what might be called "minority-inclusive" approaches ( van Anders, Schudson, et al 2022). Yet not all feminist/queer science is conducted with minoritized groups.…”

“…This can work to reify gender/sex/ual majorities' sense of privilege and centrality, thereby countering the goals of feminist/queer science. For example, minority-inclusive methods that aim to facilitate participant agency, such as allowing participants to steer the conversation, can overempower heterosexual men to make unwanted sexual advances to women researchers ( van Anders, Schudson, et al, 2022). And scholars have described how majority white men can feel "safe" enough in private interviews to comment in ways that retrench their masculinity and provide platforms and implicit support for their racist claims (Cabrera, 2019).…”

“…FEMINIST/QUEER SCIENCE 13 Feminist/queer science does need to be minority-inclusive, but it also needs to be "majority-situating" ( van Anders, Schudson, et al, 2022). Majority-situating methods help majorities see they are situated in a larger context and decenters them, introduces them to experiences and terminologies outside their experience, and provides opportunities for them to learn and grow.…”

“…Majority-situating methods help majorities see they are situated in a larger context and decenters them, introduces them to experiences and terminologies outside their experience, and provides opportunities for them to learn and grow. They may still resist this or push back, as privilege and power often does, but methodologies can be designed to curb this to some extent ( van Anders, Schudson, et al, 2022). Thus, feminist/queer science need not only be defined only by the presence/absence of minority-inclusive methodologies but also by majority-situating methodologies.…”

“…The third and final set of challenges is methodological; understandings of how to do science, feminist scholarship, and queer scholarship. Here, we focus on clashes between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, how methods that characterize feminist and queer science can actually introduce a specific problem for research with gender/sex/ual majorities 3 that we describe as "overempowerment" ( van Anders, Schudson, et al, 2022), and the challenge of materiality for feminist/queer work. Yet, existing feminist/queer science also meets these challenges.…”