WK5-DQ

Differences:

1. Recently, an insulting video toward Prophet Mohammed posted on YouTube provoked reactions of outrage around the world, especially among Arabs and Muslims. However, not all the reactions were violent. Although many of the people who reacted against the video share the same religious beliefs and similar cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds, they formed different responses to the movie. Why is that? What shaped their behavior, if it was not race, gender, ethnicity, or class? //Does this provide an example of the limitations of thinking about "difference" or does difference give us a way to make sense of it?//

2a. In one of my classes last semester, the professor asked us to name the social class of a homeless man who cannot afford his daily meals. The answer was "low-class". Then she asked, "If the same man wins a million dollars in a lottery game, and becomes a rich, uneducated man, what is this man’s new social class?'' Thus, if money, education, and occupation are all important in forming our social class, and a person lacks one or two of these, then how can we classify his/her social class?

2b. Nealon and Giroux state that: “Although we are born into a particular socioeconomic class just as surely as we’re born with a gender and race, class seems a far more malleable condition than either gender or race.” How can “class” be more adaptable and transformable in comparison to gender and/or race? //How do actual facts about class mobility in a country like the US relate to beliefs about class?//

3. //Categories of difference, according to Nealon and Giroux, are significant but not inherently meaningful. Yet gender difference is often viewed as grounded in something essential (biology) rather than being a construct. How can even gender be a construct? And why do the authors adopt the post-structuralist "difference" (which has to do with sign systems) to talk about race, class, gender, and sexuality? (265-67)//

Agency:

1. Knowing that the contexts in which we find ourselves both constrain and enable agency, what do you think makes the limits of a particular context which may lead to diversity/difference among agents? What sets agents apart in being bound to contextual sources? (p. 257)

//2. "Agency" seems like a useful concept in social/political theory, but what relevance does it have for what we do as readers, teachers, or critics of literature?//