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 [2]?
- (a)conditionality
- (b)succor
- (c)presumption
- (d)irrevocability
Answer
Why
Correct — A. The clause: 'where recognition is not a right but a [2] _______, allocated via matrices of intelligibility that are historically contingent and politically fungible'.
Not X but Y sets Y against X. A right is owed to everyone without conditions, so Y must be something granted only on terms.
The participle agrees: recognition is allocated, through matrices that are historically contingent. Conditionality, being subject to conditions, names that → option (a).
Why the others are wrong
- (b)succor — Succor means help given in hardship. Nothing in the clause is about relief: it sets a right against something allocated on contingent terms.
- (c)presumption — Presumption is something taken for granted in advance, which is close to what a right is. The clause says recognition is allocated on contingent terms, not assumed.
- (d)irrevocability — Irrevocability would make recognition impossible to withdraw, firmer even than a right. That clashes with contingent and politically fungible, which say it can shift.
Concept
Two signals decide this blank. The first is the correlative not ... but: whatever follows but must contrast with a right.
The second is what the clause says about the blank: it is allocated via matrices that are 'historically contingent and politically fungible'. Contingent means dependent on circumstances, and fungible means exchangeable.
Something handed out on terms that change with history and politics is conditional. The noun is conditionality.
In economics, conditionality means the conditions attached to a loan or aid. The passage applies the same idea to recognition: it is given only when terms are met.
Key facts
- Conditionality: the state of being subject to conditions, as with conditions attached to a loan.
- Contingent: dependent on something else, especially on circumstances.
- Fungible: interchangeable, replaceable by another of the same kind, as money is.
- Irrevocable: impossible to withdraw or reverse.
Study next
Common traps
- Reading past not ... but and choosing a word that agrees with right, such as presumption or irrevocability. The contrast demands the opposite of an unconditional guarantee.
- Choosing succor because recognition sounds like a kindness. The clause is about the terms on which it is given, not about help.
Blank [1] of the same passage is English Q.8 (keyed praxis-field). Conditionality is a wrong option at 23 Sep 2025, 09:00, English Q.9, where the dash defines the blank as 'the refusal to be coherent' and the key is asymbolic opacity.
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.