Straight White American Jesus - Christian Nationalism as National Body Dysphoria
Aired: 2021-09-20
Duration: 06:26


=== Society As A Body Metaphor (05:43) ===

[00:00:00]  Axis Mundy you you You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
[00:00:17]  Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
[00:00:21]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:00:37]  My name is Brad Onishi.
[00:00:38]  I am faculty at the University of San Francisco this semester, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center.
[00:00:44]  A very special guest.
[00:00:45]  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.
[00:00:51]  How you doing, Dan?
[00:00:52]  Good.
[00:00:53]  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.
[00:01:00]  So, it's nice to talk to you, Brad.
[00:01:03]  So, Dan, we are here today on this episode to talk about your new book.
[00:01:06]  And that book is Queer Democracy, Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body Politic, published just last week from Routledge.
[00:01:13]  And, you know, you've published all over.
[00:01:15]  You've published recently in the Academy Forum, which was an excerpt of this book.
[00:01:20]  But this is a major accomplishment.
[00:01:22]  I want to say, you know, as your co-hosting, I'm sorry, as your podcast partner, I want to say congrats.
[00:01:28]  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.
[00:01:41]  So congrats on this.
[00:01:42]  It's amazing.
[00:01:43]  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.
[00:01:56]  Can you tell us about that?
[00:01:58]  How does this work?
[00:01:59]  We have this notion of a country or a nation or a people group as a kind of body.
[00:02:07]  How does that function?
[00:02:09]  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.
[00:02:24]  That's where people might have heard of it.
[00:02:26]  And it's just the idea that a way to think about society is to think about society as a body, right?
[00:02:31]  On the metaphor of a body.
[00:02:33]  And it's a really, really old metaphor.
[00:02:35]  That's what I found out when I was looking into it.
[00:02:37]  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.
[00:02:48]  There were other cultures that used the body as a metaphor for understanding society as well.
[00:02:54]  But in our context, what's relevant, it goes all the way from the Stoics through the Christians up into the medieval period.
[00:03:00]  And we'll talk about that maybe more in a minute.
[00:03:03]  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.
[00:03:22]  And so it becomes a really specific way for envisioning society, making sense of some of society.
[00:03:28]  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.
[00:03:41]  And those are all really important issues.
[00:03:44]  One of the things about bodies is that they're not necessarily democratic.
[00:03:48]  And so, you know, bodies have, in very plain terms, heads and limbs and appendages and things like this.
[00:03:55]  In more detailed terms, right, you have something like a brain, a nervous system, right?
[00:04:00]  These carry out executive functions in a body.
[00:04:03]  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.
[00:04:21]  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?
[00:04:35]  Yeah, that's exactly how it's worked, right?
[00:04:37]  So, the way I say it in the book is, you know, somebody says, well, why this metaphor?
[00:04:41]  Why do we use this metaphor to think about society?
[00:04:44]  There are different ways you could think about society.
[00:04:47]  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.
[00:05:05]  Or a particular shape to it.
[00:05:07]  And what is that order or shape?
[00:05:08]  It's exactly as you say.
[00:05:09]  The socialist body metaphor, as it's been used for, you know, 2000 plus years, has almost always been hierarchically structured.
[00:05:19]  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.
[00:05:30]  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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