"MEET MY EXPECTATION"
‘Please meet my expectations’ is a project where the question ‘where are you really from’ is investigated in a field research. How do people respond? How does this question make people feel? With interest in the natural response to this question, we went out on the streets to try and capture this response. Here we present photographs of diverse people and one-on-one interviews about experiences related to this question.
MOTIVATION
Please meet my expectations is a field research project in the discipline of gender studies that questions the importance of our Origen as part of our identity. Moreover it addresses the issue of being raced by asking “Where are you really from”. Therefor it provokes the one asked to manipulate certain parts of their identity for example by emphasizing or hiding their Origen. Our goal was to ask this question critically and find out its purpose in conversations we as the researchers are confronted with it.
LITERATURE
Marcia Alesan Dawkins: Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity. Baylor University Press, 2012
Gayle Freda Wald: Crossing the Line. Racial Passing in the Twentieth/Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New Americanists). Duke University Press, 2000
Allyson Vanessa Hobbs: Chosen Exile - A History of Racial Passing in Amer. Harvard University Press, 2016
Werner Sollors: Neither black nor white yet both. Harvard University Press, 1999
Maria Lugones; Ellisabeth V. Spelman: Have we got theory for you!: feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for 'the woman's voice' in Women's studies international forum (Print), 1983
Patricia Hill Collins: Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection in Race, Sex & Class
Vol. 1, No. 1 Fall 1993
METHOD
We interviewed people from our social surrounding and asked them where they are really from, what this question means to them and its impact on their identity and to give concrete examples of situations in which they manipulate their identity.
These interviews were used as material to reflect upon and connect with our own experiences of being raced. The result is captured in our individual auto-ethnographic attempts. The original interviews can be found on our instagram page “please meet my expectations”.