In the following passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage intently and choose the most appropriate option to fill in each blank:
To conceive of gender as ontologically prior or naturally originary is to misrecognize its status as a [1] _______, a semiotic and performative topology whose coherence is secured only through its reiteration across spatial, legal, and psychic apparatuses. Within this regime, embodiment is not merely lived but mediated—filtered through hermeneutic technologies that valorize some corporealities while rendering others abject, deviant, or structurally unintelligible. The state, in tandem with biomedical epistemes and juridico-political grammars, exercises a necropolitical calibration of life itself—where recognition is not a right but a [2] _______, allocated via matrices of intelligibility that are historically contingent and politically fungible. This diposit if renders gender a function of discursive legibility rather than biological inevitability. Resistance, when funneled through these grammars, risks becoming complicit in the very structures it seeks to subvert. Hence, the radical task is not merely to “expand” recognition but to effect a [3] _______ of recognition’s ontological architecture. This entails refusing the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion that liberal frameworks offer and instead exposing their constitutive foreclosure of alterity. Such a politics necessitates the [4] _______ of normativity as a structuring logic of embodiment. Only through its unmaking can a post-identitarian ethics of becoming be envisioned—one that privileges contingency over coherence, opacity over transparency, and relational indeterminacy over categorical fixity. In this schema, freedom is not recuperative but [5] _______—a rupture from taxonomic legibility, a departure from the logocentric compulsion to be known.
What should come in the place of blank number [1]?
- (a)praxis-field
- (b)ontotheological mirror
- (c)diffident
- (d)nomos
Answer
Why
Correct — A. The sentence: 'to misrecognize its status as a [1] _______, a semiotic and performative topology whose coherence is secured only through its reiteration'.
The phrase after the comma is an appositive: it renames the blank. So the blank must mean what that phrase means, a spatial arrangement held together by repeated doing.
Praxis is practice, and a field is a space or domain. Praxis-field fits both halves, performative and topology → option (a).
Why the others are wrong
- (b)ontotheological mirror — Ontotheological mirror suggests a reflection of some deeper being that already exists. The sentence rejects exactly that: gender is not prior but held together by reiteration.
- (c)diffident — Diffident is an adjective meaning shy or lacking confidence. The blank ends the phrase 'as a ___,' so it needs a noun, and shyness has no place in the sentence.
- (d)nomos — Nomos, Greek for law or custom, also denies that gender is natural. But it names a rule laid down, while the appositive describes a performative field held together by repeated practice.
Concept
Ignore the jargon and read the structure. The sentence says it is a mistake to see gender as 'ontologically prior or naturally originary', existing first and by nature. Its true status is the blank.
The appositive describes that status: a performative topology whose coherence comes only from reiteration across apparatuses. What holds together only by being repeated is made by practice, not given by nature.
So the blank needs a noun for a space of practice, which is what praxis-field puts together.
The idea that gender holds together through repeated acts rather than nature is known as gender performativity, associated with Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990). You need none of that theory here: the appositive is enough.
Key facts
- Praxis: practice or action, as opposed to theory (Greek, 'doing').
- Appositive: a noun phrase placed beside another to rename it, as in 'Delhi, the capital'.
- Nomos: Greek for law, custom or convention, contrasted in Greek thought with physis, nature.
- Diffident: shy or lacking self-confidence, an adjective.
Study next
Common traps
- Choosing nomos because it also denies that gender is natural. The appositive asks for a performative field, which is practice, not a law.
- Picking the grandest-sounding option. Ontotheological mirror sounds philosophical and says the opposite: a mirror only reflects what already exists.
Blanks [2] to [5] of the same passage are English Q.9 to Q.12, keyed conditionality, destitution, ablation and apophatic. A passage in the same theory register runs at 23 Sep 2025, 09:00, English Q.8 to Q.12.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.