Overempowered? Diversity-Focused Research with Gender/Sex and Sexual Majorities
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Authors
van Anders, Sari
Schudson, Zach
Beischel, Will
Abed, Emma C.
Gormezano, Aki Michel
Dibble, Emily
Date
2021-09-02
Type
journal article
Language
en
Keyword
Methods , Diversity , Majorities , Minorities , Studying up , Gender , Sex , Sexuality
Alternative Title
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.
Description
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Citation
van Anders, S. M., Schudson, Z. C., Beischel, W. J., Abed, E. C., Gormezano, A., & Dibble, E. R. (2022). Overempowered? Diversity-Focused Research with Gender/Sex and Sexual Majorities. Review of General Psychology, 26(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680211034461
Publisher
Sage Publishing