Choose three of the following five questions/prompts. Answer each in a short essay of 500 words. Be sure to number your answers such that the number corresponds with which question you are answering. Be sure to proofread your work for proper grammar, spelling, and syntax.
Explain the Social Contract from the perspective of both Rousseau and Hobbes. What does each believe about the “state of nature”? What does each believe is the reason for people organizing into society, and what is that society like? Do you agree with Rousseau or Hobbes? Why?
What does Hannah Arendt believe about the relationship between power and violence? Be sure to define each term as carefully as possible before describing their relationship. Do you agree or disagree with Arendt? Why? Use an example to illustrate your response.
Choose two of the “theses” of The Racial Contract and describe them (being sure to cite any quote or idea you use from the text). What is your relationship to these theses? How do you personally fit into the Racial Contract? How can you resist that role?
Choose a task that you do often and of which you are well aware; it could be a sport you play, a hobby you have, or a simple task that you’ve thought about a lot. Describe your own “body comportment” while performing that task. Discuss the ways in which your body comportment conform to or deviate from the elements of gendered body comportment described by Iris Marion Young. Discuss why you think this might be, and suggest ways that you can be more aware of the way your body and the space in which you move might be gendered.
Consider your own personal raceSEXgender. Describe a way that you are raced, sexed, or gendered by society. Does this increase or decrease your own personal existential possibilities? Does it do both? Consider how continuing to conform to the ways you are raced/sexed/gendered might affect your life. Do these ways help or hinder the kind of person you want to become? How?
