Brad speaks to his co-host Dan Miller about Miller's new book, Queer Democracy: Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body Politic. Dan explains why the metaphor of the social body is helpful for understanding Christian nationalism as a visceral reaction to the expansion freedoms and rights to marginalized groups within the American body politic. In essence, Miller explains, Christian nationalism holds a myopic vision of what the American body should look like. When it morphs not only to include, but to foreground those who are not straight, White, native born, and/or Christian, it feels to the Christian nationalist as if something is wrong, even if they don't have good arguments to explain why.
Miller finishes the conversation by arguing for the promise and potential of a queer democracy.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am faculty at the University of San Francisco this semester, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center.
A very special guest.
You hear me say that a lot, but I'm not lying when I say this is a very special guest, and that is my co-host, Dan Miller.
How you doing, Dan?
Good.
And for those who may not know, or maybe this is their first episode, I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
So, it's nice to talk to you, Brad.
So, Dan, we are here today on this episode to talk about your new book.
And that book is Queer Democracy, Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body Politic, published just last week from Routledge.
And, you know, you've published all over.
You've published recently in the Academy Forum, which was an excerpt of this book.
But this is a major accomplishment.
I want to say, you know, as your co-hosting, I'm sorry, as your podcast partner, I want to say congrats.
This is, it's hard to explain to folks what it takes to write a book like this when you're balancing being the chair of your department and raising kids and trying to do a podcast with me and, you know, all that other stuff.
So congrats on this.
It's amazing.
The book is about queer democracy and And it really builds on the idea of the social body metaphor and the idea that a society is like a body.
Can you tell us about that?
How does this work?
We have this notion of a country or a nation or a people group as a kind of body.
How does that function?
Yeah, so if people have ever taken a, I don't know, maybe an American history class or a class where you had to read people like, I don't know, John Locke or Thomas Jefferson or folks like that from that time period, you'll hear this phrase of the body politic.
That's where people might have heard of it.
And it's just the idea that a way to think about society is to think about society as a body, right?
On the metaphor of a body.
And it's a really, really old metaphor.
That's what I found out when I was looking into it.
And none of this is groundbreaking research, but in our culture and say, you know, broadly speaking, Western or European culture, it goes all the way back to the pre-Christian Stoics.
There were other cultures that used the body as a metaphor for understanding society as well.
But in our context, what's relevant, it goes all the way from the Stoics through the Christians up into the medieval period.
And we'll talk about that maybe more in a minute.
What it does is just a way of trying to understand society as a whole and what it imagines society as is this kind of organic totality where all of the parts fit together in a particular way and carry out a particular role, just like the parts of the body fit together in a particular way, carry out a particular role, and so forth.
And so it becomes a really specific way for envisioning society, making sense of some of society.
And also, and this is this is where we'll probably spend a lot of our discussion in casting a vision of what society should be like and and who should be doing what in that society.
And those are all really important issues.
One of the things about bodies is that they're not necessarily democratic.
And so, you know, bodies have, in very plain terms, heads and limbs and appendages and things like this.
In more detailed terms, right, you have something like a brain, a nervous system, right?
These carry out executive functions in a body.
Whereas you might have things like capillaries that are really important and absolutely essential to a body, but are not viewed as the kind of executive heads or executive systems of a body.
This leads me to wonder, as people have used this metaphor throughout time, has it lent itself to hierarchical rather than egalitarian visions of societies and countries and so on?
Yeah, that's exactly how it's worked, right?
So, the way I say it in the book is, you know, somebody says, well, why this metaphor?
Why do we use this metaphor to think about society?
There are different ways you could think about society.
And I think what the metaphor has done historically, if you look all the way from those pre-Christian Stoics all the way up, and this is what I think it still does, is the way I put it is it captures a desire, a certain desire for the way society ought to be, and it captures a desire for a society that has a particular order to it.
Or a particular shape to it.
And what is that order or shape?
It's exactly as you say.
The socialist body metaphor, as it's been used for, you know, 2000 plus years, has almost always been hierarchically structured.
The very clear sense that some of those social members occupy a higher place and play a more important role, that some members are subordinate and some are superordinate.
And it has been very, very much inegalitarian, hierarchical, and to put it in contemporary terms, it's always been a pretty anti-democratic kind of conception of society, which is part of why I'm writing about it.
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