College Level Reading Comprehension Test.....

             

I don't know if they do this anymore, but there used to be a Reading Comprehension segment in the SAT used as a benchmark for college applications.  I suspect the whole idea has been spit-canned as oppressive and discriminatory and anti-anything else you can think of.

For our purposes here, if you wish to gain admission to the Other Side School of Advanced Reality, you will still have to sit for a test which measures your abilities in this area, along with others.  We think it only fair to give you a sense of what the Reading Comprehension challenges will look like.

Please read the following passage once carefully.  After you have done so, proceed to the related multiple choice questions.  You may not use your phone or any other digital aide, and you may not converse with your fellow test-takers.

You have a total of 5 minutes to read the passage and answer the questions.  Begin on my mark.....GO!

The evacuation of interior essences and normative, disciplinary assumptions of gender cores and consistencies has been critical to the shift in postmodern queer theories from biological and psychological determinisms to analyses of social norms and their complex roles in the formation of gendered identities. At the theoretical level, our efforts to clear away foundationalisms and evacuate interior essences have left us with an expanded vocabulary for talking about discursive and social complexities. I will argue here, however, that lesbian and gay work fails at times to realize its potential for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations, at moments when, almost in spite of itself, it at least implicitly conceives gender in negative terms, in the terms of fixity, miring, or subjection to the indicatively female body, with the consequence that escape from gender, usually in the form of disembodiment and always in the form of gender crossings, becomes the goal and the putative achievement.

Question 1:  Would you want to attend a college where the faculty talks and writes like this?

Question 2:  How many times did you refer to the dictionary you had hidden up your sleeve?

Question 3:  Do you think an exorcism could heal the psyche of the individual who wrote these words?

Question 4:  How much would you and/or your parent(s) be willing to pay for an education at the author's institution?

Question 5:  How much weed would it take for you to mellow out after reading this passage?

Question 6:  Which of the following best describes "the evacuation of interior essences?"  (No write in answers allowed.)

Question 7:  Would you be better off or worse off after matriculation at such an institution?

Question 8:  Which major would this brief narrative best be a core element of?

Question 9:  How many times have you experienced disembodiment?

Question 10:  Have you ever practiced safe disembodiment?

Question 11:  Did your partner give you verbal consent?

Question 12:  Did you find it rewarding and pleasurable?

Question 13:  If you could disembody the author, which method would you choose?

Question 14:  Can you believe people who write such swill actually earn more than you will ever dream of making?

Choices for all questions, because coming up with targeted choices for each individual question called for us to care more than is humanly possible, are shown below.  Besides, you're probably too mentally adrift to deal with a different set of answers for each question.

a) Wanna, like, hook-up tomorrow night?

b) Wow, this dude smokes some awesome weed; can I get me some?

c) Like, get totally serious!  I could, like, care less.

d) Can I just, like, get a participation certificate?

Closing editorial note:

In case you think the reading passage is something plucked out of a parallel universe in which breaks with reality are the norm, you would be so incredibly wrong.  The passage is actually written by someone who has risen to the highest level of Academia....and presides over an institution most would consider in the same "peer group" as Brunswick's beloved Bowdoin.

So put that in your bong and smoke it.