Susan Krieger

Beyond “subjectivity”: The use of the self in social science

Insights about the observers self can prove useful for understanding others who are the subjects of sociological inquiry. This organizational sociologist studied a midwestern lesbian community using participant observation and in depth interviewing. Subsequent problems with preparing the findings led to development of an analytic technique for dealing with the data. The argument here is that we have much to learn from close examination of the interrelationship between observer and observed.

Lesbian Identity and Community: Recent Social Science Literature

This article reviews recent social science literature on the relationship between lesbian identity and community. Specifically, it considers how lesbian communities both affirm and challenge the individual lesbians sense of self. There is much in the autobiographical literature on lesbian experience that makes us aware that lesbian communities enhance that sense of self. These communities provide a haven or home in a hostile or distrusting outside world. They lend support for what is frequently a stigmatized life-style choice. They command recognition of a distinctively lesbian sensibility-a sensibility that is unusual because of the value it places on intimacy between women. Yet lesbian communities, along with their virtues, also pose crucial identity problems for their members. At times, they seem to threaten as well as affirm individual identity. The problems posed by lesbian communities are similar to those found in many other social groups and especially in minority groups, where efforts to achieve group solidarity and cohesiveness often conflict with efforts to foster individuality and to tolerate internal deviance.

Losing My Vision

This article is about the author’s experience of losing her eyesight, but it is also, more broadly, a reflection on the nature of vision—what it is, how it can be maintained, and how unique inner visions can be valued. When the author began to lose her eyesight, and the outer world became no longer visible to her as it had been before, she began to create a counterposing internal vision so that her sense of her own value would remain intact. She thinks we are all to some extent blind, to some extent sighted, and each of us moves in a world of unique inner vision, an interior landscape that is composed of meanings, of sights and sounds, and feelings deeply held.

The Mirror Dance in retrospect.

SUMMARY In this article, Susan Krieger reflects on lessons learned from her classic study of a lesbian community, The Mirror Dance, first published in 1983. Kriegers study was unusual in that it eschewed a traditional social scientists narrative voice, and instead was written from the point of view of the multiple voices of community members. In this retrospective piece, Krieger again challenges us to think in “multiple voices” about the importance of lesbian communities.

Prospects for communication policy

At stake in communication policymaking is control and use of technologies central to the process of governance in society. Future policies must admit a broader range of social goals than present ones. Defining such goals will require shifting conceptual approaches from regulation to investment, from information goods to communication resources, and from consumerism to politics. Persons engaged in communication policy research and planning had best avoid traps of being blinded by the technology, underestimating the political process and making easy assumptions about goals and values.