Queer Democracy

Daniel D. Miller examines the long-standing comparison of society to a human body from an interdisciplinary standpoint. He draws on queer and transgender accounts of embodiment and treats them as a useful resource for rethinking politics and social life.

Miller contends that the image has consistently reflected a desire for social and political order, anchored in an imagined normative shape, or morphology, of the social body. Tracing this pattern from the concord discourses of the pre-Christian Stoics to present-day nationalism and populism, he finds a steady record of dissent being suppressed when it threatens to undo the body's presumed normativity. In his reading, the embodied ideal at the core of the metaphor is a fantasy, and hostile responses to dissent are visceral, dysphoric reactions to attempts to reshape that body.

Miller holds that the social body is essentially queer, defined by fluidity and the lack of any fixed morphology. From this he develops the idea of queer democracy, which he presents as an ongoing set of social and political practices aimed at extending liberty and equality into new domains. The book sets out a new direction for connecting queer and trans theory with political theory.

Written for both academic and non-academic readers, the book speaks to those working on political theory, populism, US religion, gender studies, and queer studies.