The first time I met her, like, face-to-face met her, it was a warm, sunny afternoon in September. She hurried out of her apartment, accompanied by her "housemate" (a word I'd never heard before, but still use, to this day) and carrying some sort of homemade gourmet picnic goodies. She was on the petite side, and had a mysterious little smile and shrewd, observing eyes. Her name was Jeana, and she, like me, had left her home and family behind in order to launch her academic life at Indiana University.
And there is where our similarities both began and ended. From the beginning, I could tell that she was one of the most remarkable individuals I had ever--have ever--encountered. She had lived in a commune in Berkeley. She belly-danced. She was ferociously driven and ambitious. She had traveled many different places. She loved gourmet cooking, and belly dancing, and games and gaming. She wrote, she was interested in yoga and rock-climbing, and she always seemed to fucking succeed at everything she did. When she wasn't teaching or attending classes or writing papers, she was planning research trips and reading feminist theory books and submitting conference proposals or writing articles. Life, the way she lived it, was productive and intriguing and magical. I loved being in her orbit, loved watching her talk and bellydance, loved the feelings of creativity and potential that could arise when I spent enough time with her. I suppose I felt like a bit of a bourgeois dullard around her, but I know Jeana would have been the first to admonish me for those feelings. Jeana was all about owning yourself, and your identity.
All that was years ago, of course. Oddly, I ended up moving out to Jeana's native Southern California, whereas she has stayed in Indiana, carefully cultivating a respectable academic career and becoming something of a big fucking deal on the bellydance scene. I miss Jeana, like I miss all of the folks from my grad school years, but I also miss her insights, relentlessly logical yet still fraught with honest, if somewhat constrained, emotion. So it's not surprising that I finally got off my duff and found her blog to catch myself up on the life of this amazing woman.
Back in the day--and for probably well over a decade--she shared the minutiae of her every day life in LiveJournal. Alas, the times have changed, and her LJ is--like most of our grad school careers--a thing of the past, but she now blogs on her website. And I have to admit, I kind of miss the minutiae of her darkly magical life. Still, it was in reading her blog recently that I found a post of hers that was completely empowering and just beautifully inspiring:
"I share about my life in order to say yes, I’m a woman, and yes, I happen to be extraordinarily intelligent, but I do not neglect my physical existence, and if you have a problem with that, well, you should work on those unconscious biases of yours while I’m over here busily (and happily) living my life.
There’s another reason that I share, sometimes to the point of oversharing. I’m painfully aware that people like me did not and do not always have a voice. Very few written records of historical women’s daily experiences exist. Those that do are, in European history at least, overwhelmingly noble (as not many lower-class women could read or write). Other people at the margins of society... have also been voiceless and powerless in many situations, throughout many centuries. This makes me angry. I know that our oppressions and struggles are not equal or symmetrical, but I’m angry nonetheless. I’m angry that our experiences get lost and neglected because literacy and education are not yet considered universal human rights. I’m angry that history was written by the victors, most of whom were wealthy, Christian, heterosexual, monogamous, cis-gendered, neurotypical, European white men. I’m angry that even with the wealth of information at my fingertips thanks to the Internet, I still won’t be able to learn about what women’s lives were like in historical periods when men’s lives, and the lives of the rich, and the religious upper castes, were the sole ones being documented.
As a folklorist, I believe in the transformative power of personal narratives, those stories we tell based on our experiences. I want to see everyone’s lives documented. We all have stories, and those stories are treasures.
As a feminist, I want to see women, women’s lives, and women’s experiences and stories valued at least as much as those of men. I want to see that for all oppressed peoples no matter why they’re being oppressed, whether it’s skin color or religion or social class or sexuality or gender identity or nationality or (dis)ability.
So I share about my life. Sometimes I overshare. I broadcast it to the world, documenting it on the screen and in pen and ink. Maybe these small acts of resistance matter as such, and maybe they don’t, maybe they border on solipsism and narcissism. But I share because I know there are people like me living right now who cannot. Because if I’d been born perhaps one century ago, and definitely two or three centuries or more ago, I would not have been able to document my life.
Again and again, I return to the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” And yet I long for a day when it will no longer be useful. Perhaps documenting lives, even to the point of oversharing, is a step that will help us imagine that future."
-Jeana Jorgensen, PhD, from "In Praise of Oversharing," published 7/24/2013
Every day, if I think about blogging, or journaling, or even writing a letter to someone, I wonder, "Well, what the fuck should I post?" It feels silly and self-absorbed, usually, to sit here and talk about the interminable desert sunshine, or the nutty patron du jour, or the book that I'm reading, or the time spent at the gym, or the chores (such as they are) done. But then...why the fuck not? It might not be a riveting story, but it's my story, and goddamn...I reckon I've got the power to choose how I tell it.
So, even 10 years after I met her, Jeana is still changing my life, inspiring and influencing me. Like Jeana, I hope to own my words, my life, my experiences, and document and celebrate them.
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