Queer Democracy - Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body Politic

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 o