Queer Democracy

Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body Politic

Daniel D. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000418842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queer Democracy undertakes an interdisciplinary critical investigation of the centuries-old metaphor of society as a body, drawing on queer and transgender accounts of embodiment as a constructive resource for reimagining politics and society.

Daniel Miller argues that this metaphor has consistently expressed a desire for social and political order, grounded in the social body's imagined normative shape or morphology. The consistent result, from the "concord" discourses of the pre-Christian Stoics, all the way through to contemporary nationalism and populism, has been the suppression of any dissent that would unmake the social body's presumed normativity. Miller argues that the conception of embodiment at the heart of the metaphor is a fantasy, and that negative social and political reactions to dissent represent visceral, dysphoric responses to its reshaping of the social body. He argues that social body's essential queerness, defined by fluidity and lack of a fixed morphology, spawns queer democracy, expressed through ongoing social and political practices that aim to extend liberty and equality to new social domains.

Queer Democracy articulates a new departure for the ongoing development of theoretical articulations linking queer and trans theory with political theory. It will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers engaged in research on political theory, populism, US religion, gender studies, and queer studies.

1

Dysphoric Desire

Fantasizing the Social Body

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163923-2

Introduction

What I call the “social-as-body” metaphor has served as a primary means for imagining society throughout Western history. This metaphor has consistently expressed a disposition to proper, almost always hierarchical, social and political order. This is evident in a crucial presupposition about embodiment underlying the metaphor, namely that bodies are naturally defined by a normative morphology, a proper shape, providing the ideal against which other expressions of embodiment are measured and evaluated. These themes of proper order and normative morphology are directly related: the body’s normative morphology requires that each of its members is in its proper place—the body’s organic unity depends on its members’ proper ordering. “Place” in this understanding is defined by both function and structural relation—bodily members can be said to be in their proper place only insofar as they play their prescribed role within the larger body and, in carrying out that role, stand in proper relation to other members. Applied to the social, then, this presupposition plays out in the presumption that the social body is also defined by a normative morphology, and that this normative morphology is maintained only as the social body’s members remain in their proper places, playing their proper social roles, and standing in proper relation to the social body’s other members.

It is important to appreciate the import of the term “proper,” which appears numerous times in this description and will occur many times more in the discussion that follows. Whenever applied to the body’s (flesh-and-blood or social) morphology, to members’ roles within the body, to social structures and practices, and so on, the term proper is intended to convey significant normative force. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, proper entered the English language already reflecting a lengthy logical development from the French propre and Latin proprius (“one’s own, special, particular, peculiar”) (“Proper” 1991). Reflecting this, proper is intended to convey the meaning, “what it should be, or what is required; such as one ought to do” (“Proper” 1991) and, as an adjective, “as it ought to be, or as one ought to do” (“Properly” 1991). The body accords with its normative morphology only to the degree that it has the shape it ought to have and its members occupy their proper place to the extent that they remain where and as they should be, do as they ought to do. Location and function’s normative force is given in the fact that they become individual members of the body’s defining properties, their sine qua non or essence (“Property” 1991). Members exercise propriety to just the extent that they maintain their “proper state or condition” (“Propriety” 1991), occupying their required place and acting according to their defining role. When, by way of contrast, bodily members are “out of place,” failing to carry out their defining roles and to maintain the body’s defining structure, they are improper, acting inappropriately or with impropriety.

To reiterate, then, the social-as-body metaphor has consistently expressed a disposition to proper social and political order, with all the normative force implied in that term. Over the course of its development, two broad emphases, reflecting this “logic of the proper,” have remained consistent. The first and most obvious is the emphasis on the social body’s normative morphology, on its proper shape. The second is the existential danger posed to the social body by individual members that are out of place, failing to fulfill their proper role and/or disrupting the proper structural relation of the body’s members. The existential nature of the danger posed by bodily members that are out of place lends the social body’s morphology its experienced normative force. This normative force is concretely expressed in active efforts to maintain, enforce, and, if necessary, reimpose the social body’s proper shape, reflected in its members’ proper ordering. Such efforts represent dysphoric responses to a body perceived to have been rendered morphologically misshapen, grotesque, or monstrous.

A number of divergence themes flow together in the remainder of the chapter, and some orientation to that discussion is in order. This chapter introduces the social-as-body metaphor and the analytical framework that will orient the chapters that follow. The chapter begins with a brief history of the social-as-body metaphor in Western social and political thought.¹ Following this historical account, the chapter moves on to discuss the social-as-body metaphor’s specific nature as metaphor. What does it mean, for example, to describe the body as a metaphor for the social? In response to this question, I argue that the social-as-body metaphor is a “dispositional metaphor,” a metaphor structuring and expressing social perceptions, affects, and practices oriented around the maintenance of social and political order. Building on this, I next consider the question of what kind of body has been presupposed within the frame of the social-as-body metaphor. This is where I more fully discuss the notion of the body’s normative morphology and the dysphoric responses provoked by the impropriety of members of the body who are out of place. My argument that dysphoria, a crucial concept for all that follows in this book, is an essentially social phenomenon is one of the key elements of this chapter. I appropriate this psychological term because it has to do, fundamentally, with questions of normative embodiment, as I illustrate with a discussion of gender dysphoria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). I argue that the clinical conception of gender dysphoria reveals (albeit tacitly) its fundamentally social nature, with the consequence that its application to the social body represents a natural extension.

The chapter’s final section introduces the theoretical orientation that structures the remainder of the book. Bringing together queer and trans-theoretical accounts of embodiment with Slavoj Žižek’s theorization of political fantasy, I argue that the morphologically normative body imagined within the social-as-body metaphor is fantastical in nature. In contrast to the understanding of the body as defined by a proper shape, I argue that bodies, individual and social, are fundamentally queer, by which I mean that they are defined by a morphologically fluidity, having no fixed or proper shape. In expressing the desire for the morphologically normative social body, the social-as-body metaphor has expressed a desire for an impossible object, highlighting the inherently non-rational nature of efforts to maintain or reassert its normative social and political order, hence their description as dysphoric.²

I conclude by arguing that recognizing embodiment’s fundamentally queer nature allows us to reimagine the social body, embracing its morphological fluidity. It allows for the expression of alternative dispositions to those oriented to social and political order. Specifically, it allows for the expression of what I will call “queer democracy,” originating in the social body’s “monstrous (un)becoming” (Sullivan 2006, 560) and representing its productive unmaking with the aim of extending the democratic principles of liberty and equality to new social domains.

Historical Development of the Social-as-Body Metaphor

It would be difficult to overstate how pervasive the “society as corporate body” metaphor has been within Western social and political thought. As Margaret M. Mitchell (1993) notes,

the metaphor of the body for the political organism … is very old, going back at least as far as the 5th and 4th centuries BCE … The metaphor is also frequently attested in Greco-Roman literature well into the 2nd century CE, as also in Hellenic Jewish texts.

(158)

Of the social-as-body’s various expressions, the Pauline formulation of the church as the “Body of Christ” plays a pivotal role. On the one hand, it carries the metaphor forward from its pre-Christian context, while on the other hand it provides the materials out of which the concept of the body politic will develop in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Paul and the “Body of Christ”

While Paul develops elements of this theme in several passages (see Dunn 1992, 147–148), the locus classicus for his discussion, and the passage which has had the greatest historical force, is in 1 Corinthians 12:12–26. Michelle V. Lee (2006) situates Paul’s 1 Cor. 12 discourse within the context of antique “concord speeches” (homonoia), which regularly employed the metaphor of the body to urge political and social unity (29), employed by Paul to combat factionalism within the Christian community in Corinth (Mitchell 1993, 160). Indeed, unity is a constant theme across Paul’s different discussions (Dunn 1992, 148, 154).

As Lee (2006) notes, Paul makes two central points in his opening: 1.) The one body is composed of many members and 2.) the many members constitute a single body (125): “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12, NRSV). In this formulation, Paul emphasizes both unity and diversity as constitutive features of the Christian community (125), and he extends his claim in the following verse (12:13), insisting that “that the Christians/Christ are one body in the Spirit [Gr. Pneuma]” (128–129).

As Mitchell (1993) notes, Paul’s deployment of the body metaphor to combat factionalism is “combined with an awareness of the political theory of the [body’s] mixed constitution” (160). Thus, “as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Cor. 12:18, NRSV). The overall thrust of Paul’s argument in 1 Cor. 12:4–11 is therefore that “each person has his or her own individual gifts and roles to play, each of which in its own way benefits the community,” so that the Corinthian Christians are mutually interdependent (268). The effect is a divinely ordained hierarchy of social roles and functions (269), such that each individual can “achieve happiness no matter what one’s circumstances were” (Lee 2006, 137–138) precisely through the maintenance, rather than disruption of, the existing social order. Reflecting this, Paul emphasizes the need for the members of the Christian body to be satisfied with their assigned role, emphasizing the disruption to the body that would follow from a lack of such satisfaction (1 Cor. 12:19–25).

Of greater interest than the specifics of Paul’s argument, for our purposes, is just how typical of antique discourse it is. Stoic thought provides the background or context of Paul’s formulation (Lee 2006, 23), and Stoicism’s overall influence on this aspect of his thought is well established (see Dunn 1992; Mitchell 1993; Martin 1999; Lee 2006). Mitchell (1993) highlights that “Paul’s Christian version of the body image, the body of Christ, is an exact correlative of its Greco-Roman counterparts not only in its details, but also in its application” (268), representing a uniformity that extends “even to the details” of his argument, and that the metaphor’s application as an argument against social discord replays “one of the most common applications of the body metaphor for the state in antiquity” (159). Indeed, she notes that the latter represents “the most common topos in ancient literature for unity” (161). In arguing for the body’s unity-in-complementarity to combat factionalism, Paul not only rehearses a commonplace of antique rhetoric, but even deploys the same technical language (268), and his argument that the body’s health is threatened by discord represents the very heart of the classical appeal to the rhetoric of the body in concord speeches (Lee 2006, 43).

Paul’s emphasis that the individual body parts’ ultimate oneness is granted through the Spirit (Gr. pneuma) also reflects Stoic ontology (Lee 2006, 131), insofar as pneuma, in Stoic thought, “is a kind of ‘stuff’ that is the agent of perception, motion, and life itself; it pervades other forms of stuff and, together with those other forms, constitutes the self” (Martin 1999, 21; see also 21–25). The Stoics typically conceived of pneuma as the material that holds together bodies composed of multiple parts (i.e., bodies of mixed constitution, as presupposed by Paul), joining those parts into a unified body (Lee 2006, 49–50). We could say, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Dysphoric Desire: Fantasizing the Social Body
• 2. Traversing the Fantasy: Queer Democracy
• 3. Bedeviled by Nature: The Social Contract Tradition
• 4. Fantasies of Authenticity: Populism and Nationalism
• 5. American Dysphoria I: Christian Nationalism
• 6. American Dysphoria II: Civic Nationalism
• Conclusion
• Index