Diversity-Focused Research with Gender/Sex and Sexual Majorities
With co-authors Zach C Schudson, Will J Beischel, Emma C. Abed, Aki Gormezano, & Emily R Dibble 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.
Sari van Anders
2022, Review of General Psychology
https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680211034461
Issue: 1 Volume: 26 Page Numbers: 3-21 Publication Date: 2022 Publication Name: Review of General Psychology
Diversity-Focused Research with Gender/Sex and Sexual Majorities
1 comment:
Research Interests
Our research program focuses on sex research, gender/sex and sexual diversity, and social neuroendocrinology, all within a feminist/queer science perspective. Within sex research, we tend to explore: desire, orgasm, pleasure, porn, and others, (including with our newly developed heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire in women partnered with men). Within gender/sex and sexual diversity, we tend to explore understandings of gender/sex and sexual diversity, including with models we've developed (like sexual configurations theory), and with relevance to trans, nonbinary, queer, and/or other minoritized gender/sex and sexual experiences/identities/existences as well as "studying up" with gender/sex and sexual majorities. With social neuroendocrinology, we tend to explore iterative associations between desire and testosterone, and how social behavioural contexts related to intimacy, sexuality, and power/oppression change testosterone (including with our steroid/peptide theory of social bonds).
We aim to conduct and develop ways to do socially situated science that are biologically expansive (not reductionist), biolegible (i.e., to other bioscientists), and informed by lived experiences (critically reflective narratives of minoritized and marginalized folks). Some of our research includes sexuality, gender/sex and sexual diversity, and social neuroendocrinology, while some of it fits into only one of these areas. To do our work, we use diverse interdisciplinary methods that include qualitative approaches, quantitative approaches, mixed methods, as well as theory- and model-building. Our work connects with feminist and queer science studies and practice; all our work is done within a feminist/queer science framework, and we are committed to social action and change within academia.
Post a Comment