Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “politics of recognition.” In that model, various identities receive public acknowledgment from the state. Promise and perils: to recognize is to respect, but it is also, to return to one of my themes, to essentialize. 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
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