Jacqueline M. Martinez

"It is by living in my time that I am able to understand other times, by plunging into the present and the world, by taking on deliberately what I am fortuitously, by willing what I will and doing what I do, that I can go further." These words, authored by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, express the most basic sense of purpose in all of my intellectual and practical work. To take up this purpose means to set aside the aim of ultimate or transparent knowing in favor of an openness to discovery of all that is imminent and transcendent in the fact of being human. As much as I am privileged with a professional life defined by intellectual inquiry, I am also fortunate enough to recognize the easy traps of presumed knowledge, whether of oneself, others or the world.

I am, for example, an identical twin, and the significance of that fact has been well beyond my comprehension for virtually all of my life. It is a strange feeling, to come to such a monumental awareness of one's self only after nearly five decades of life. My interest in martial arts has a similar effect for me. I have dedicated much of my life to the practice of traditional Shotokan karate. The lessons I continue to learn over what has been a span of more than 30 years surprise me for their simplicity and power, and give me pause to recognize how easy it is to think that one can know fully what one sees and feels.

I was born and raised in Southern California where I attended public schools and spent as much time as I possibly could outdoors playing organized and unorganized sports of all types. I am an identical twin and my twin and I are the youngest members of our family. I have two brothers and one other sister. My parents divorced when I was in Jr. High School, and my growing up family life was characterized by many of the stresses associated with a broken family and an older brother and sister during the hey-day of free-spirit recreational drug use during the 1970s. My interest in intellectual work developed only after I recognized I could not make a living playing sports or doing karate. My coming to recognize and embrace my sexual orientation toward women was also a key force directing me toward a life of reflection and study.

In my professional life I have been motivated by my interest in understanding how people come to self-awareness and understanding as they are influenced by the time, place, and fact of experience. None of us become who we become outside of the powerful influence of culture, history and the specifics of our social and familial worlds. Yet, neither are we simply determined by these very important influences. My professional life has been dedicated to sorting through these complex dynamics as they are present in communication. My first book, Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity, was born of this very effort.