We were deep into an episode about professor-student romance — specifically Kissing Tolstoy by Penny Reid — talking through everything the book got right about handling institutional consent, when the conversation turned to something the book never addressed: race.
The heroine, Anna, is biracial — a detail so lightly handled on the page that Nikki missed it entirely on a first read, catching it only when a secondary character mentioned it in passing. And once that fact was on the table, it became impossible not to notice everything else layered underneath the more obvious power dynamic the book was interested in examining — not only race, but class, wealth, and gender as well.
That’s when Meg brought up The Wheel of Power and Privilege, a tool from equity and inclusion education created by Sylvia Duckworth in 2020.
long before either of us picked up a romance novel with an eye toward using it. What follows isn’t a new analytical system we invented — it’s what happened when we ran an actual book through someone else’s lens, and found it changed how we read every power-imbalanced trope after it.
What is the Wheel of Power & Privilege?
The Wheel of Power and Privilege maps a set of identity characteristics — citizenship, skin color, formal education, body ability, sexuality, neurodiversity, mental health, body size, housing, wealth, language, gender — as a series of concentric rings. The center of the wheel represents the most socially privileged position across all of them at once: a white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, neurotypical, slim-bodied, property-owning, wealthy, English-speaking, cisgendered citizen. Every characteristic that shifts away from that center represents a real, specific form of marginalization — and the further out any given trait sits, the less structural power that identity tends to carry in the world the wheel was built to describe.
It wasn’t invented to talk about fiction, especially not romance novels, or power-imbalanced tropes, or age gap, or professor/student, or boss/employee.
We just think it’s worth adding to the discussion.
The Case Study of a Romance Novel Power Imbalance
Run Kissing Tolstoy‘s Luca and Anna through the wheel, and the picture gets a lot more specific than “professor, student, age gap.”
- Skin color: Luca is white. Anna is biracial — a detail the book itself barely engages with aside from Anna wrapping her hair before bed.
- Gender: He’s male; she’s female — the more obvious layer the book does engage with.
- Formal education: Luca has a graduate degree and institutional standing. Anna is still a student.
- Body ability: Both able-bodied, as far as the text tells us.
- Wealth: Luca’s professorship is, notably, funded by his own family’s endowment — he holds financial security that was never actually earned through the position itself. Anna is a student, without that cushion.
- Housing: Luca owns, Anna lives in the dorms.
Once you lay it out this way, the book’s actual power gap is bigger than “professor and student.” It’s professor and student, interracial, plus age, plus standing/prestige, plusgenerational wealth gap. None of that is necessarily a dealbreaker for a romance… in fact, it can make the book more interesting!
But a book that create a massive power imbalance and leaves most axes of powe completely unexamined is doing incomplete work.
Why This Matters Within the Romance Genre
The real use of the wheel isn’t scoring books pass or fail. It’s a diagnostic question, asked consistently:
- Who holds the power in this relationship?
- How much is the plot examining the disparity?
Those questions applies to the tropes were we often see these imbalances: professor/student. Age gap romance, billionaire romance, boss/employee, celebrity/civilian, etc. Any book where one character holds structural leverage the other doesn’t benefits from being run through more than the one axis the book itself foregrounds. A billionaire romance that carefully addresses the money gap while never once considering race, ability, or immigration status has a limited perspective. So does an age-gap romance that treats the years between two characters as only “oh, you don’t get my cultural references, isnt’ that funny?” without addressing how that changes their interpersonal relationship and external perception.
And there’s another question rising to prominence in more progressive romance fiction: How is the more powerful character leveraging their privilege to uplift others?
When Meg wrote Peppermint Bark, No Bite, the power imbalance was intentional. Alex is a financially stable cisgender heterosexual male lawyer — an alpha male by all accounts, including his own self-perception. Yet when he meets Grace — a transgender bisexual social worker renting an apartment from his family — Alex’s worldview is rocked by what he learns from her about community and family. Spoiler alert: He reexamines his relationship with his lucrative career and makes some major changes to his values.
She played with the opposite dynamic in All Twerk, No Play: The heroine Victoria is the one with all the privilege of education & generational wealth, while Cruz is younger, working three jobs, and facing housing instability. His reality changes her perspective repeatedly, so that when she steps into a position with even more power (no spoilers!), she’s able to use ot to change her entire community.
None of this means a book has to solve every inequality it depicts to be a good romance, or even a responsible one. Plenty of the best books in this genre leave some of these questions open, unresolved, or genuinely uncomfortable — and that’s often more honest than tidying everything up.
What the wheel offers isn’t a rulebook for what authors must do. It’s a better set of questions for what we, as readers, are actually noticing — and a way to name the layers of a power dynamic that “it’s just an age gap” or “it’s just professor and student” tends to flatten into one axis when there were always several.
Where You’ll See This Applied
We check books against this lens whenever a real power imbalance is doing structural work in the story — most directly on our Professor/Student Romance Books list, where the question of who actually holds power, and over what, comes up in nearly every pick.
The Wheel of Power and Privilege was created by Sylvia Duckworth. Her original wheel and further reading on the tool is worth exploring directly — what’s above is our own application of her framework to a genre she likely never had in mind, not a replacement for the source.