When the state gazes at us—with its identity cards, educational stipulations, and other instruments of recognition—it invariably fixes and rigidifies a phenomenon that is neither fixed nor rigid. I have called this the Medusa Syndrome: what the state gazes upon, it tends to turn to stone.25 It sculpts what it purports merely to acknowledge. The strategy, as we’ve learned, is inadequate to the real-world complexities, to compound identities that grow as pleated as an accordion, with all its folds and fissures.
