Before he was elected Speaker of the House on 25 Oct. 2023, Mike Johnson seems to have eluded the spotlight with the fancy footwork of a ballerina dancing into it. Then, suddenly, people cared about his opinions on the issues most dividing Americans today. In a recent Fox News interview, Johnson explained his worldview only by instructing viewers to “pick up a Bible,” but his earlier writing clarifies what exactly this means. He used a 2004 op-ed, for instance, to call same-sex desire—and marriage—“inherently unnatural.”
What interests me about this comment, as an early modernist who studies transhistorical ideas of normative embodiment and mindedness, is Johnson’s recourse to the authority of Nature, in the sense of a “universal” law (to use Lorraine Daston’s term). On the one hand, we shouldn’t be surprised by this tack: the unnaturalness of homosexuality has been a mainstay of conservative talking points for decades now. On the other hand, we—those of us who disagree with Johnson, at least—mustn’t take for granted his regression to a normative standard of Nature. This strategy has a history far longer than the culture wars of the last fifty years. Understanding its backstory not only shines a light on the argumentative ground into which our speaker has rooted himself but also reveals strategies for deracinating him—on his own terms, with his own tools of oppression. Nature has been weaponized against queer, crip, non-white, non-male (the list continues) people for centuries now—often at the same time. And only by collaborating to unfix any stable notion of its operations—the way it’s inflected our lived realities in shared and disparate ways alike—can we frustrate its pernicious uses today. The present essay represents a small contribution to this collective effort.
I.
Perhaps I’m biased, but the Renaissance—and the crip lens through which I reevaluate it, as someone who walks with a cane and ankle-foot orthotic—offers an important starting point for comprehending Nature’s continued influence. This was an age committed to the possibilities of experimental science and a revivified Greco-Roman rationalism, but one animated by a deeply religious, Christian impulse too. No wonder that Nature—long a preoccupation of ancient luminaries from Plato to Galen—became freighted with authority both inherent and divine. In 1642, the intoxicating prose stylist, and doctor, Thomas Browne was speaking for many when he called Nature the “servant” of God (1.16).
This idea can boast of some major implications. Summarizing how his friend, the noted physician William Harvey, discovered that blood circulates through the body, for example, scientist Robert Boyle explains, “he took notice that the valves in the veins of so many several parts of the body were so placed that they gave free passage to the blood towards the heart, but opposed the passage of the venal blood the contrary way” (Cunningham 88). Harvey was thus “invited to imagine that so provident a cause as Nature had not so placed so many valves without design.”
Of course, we’ve all benefited from Harvey’s bombshell revelation in De motu cordis (1628). But early moderns also weaponized the normative principle of Nature against apparently deformed people like me. The scholar Elizabeth Bearden has even gone so far, invaluably, as to argue that for Renaissance thinkers, Nature functioned as Normal eventually would in the nineteenth century, enabling a category of disability-like difference before many theorists have argued the identity emerged. I can cite but one example here from the French physician Ambroise Paré. Admittedly, he should be remembered for more effectively treating gunshot wounds and minimizing hemorrhage during surgery, but it’s worth recalling his treatise On Monsters and Marvels too. It minces no words: “Maimed persons”—including blind, humpbacked, limping, six-fingered, flat-nosed, hermaphroditic people—are “against Nature” (Pallister 3). Paré goes on to enumerate the reasons why these folks can be born with—or acquire—such defects in the first place: some accounts are supernaturally driven, others in closer alignment with the period’s heralded empiricism. Regardless, “maimed” folks are stigmatized for falling short of a natural standard. Then again, how seriously can we take a metric so obviously predicated upon disturbing fancy, unabashed bias, and (as becomes unsurprisingly clear throughout the book) commonplace racism?
II.
The story I want to tell, however, doesn’t end on such a dour note. After all, the Renaissance archive would be far less energizing than I’ve suggested it is here if its only purpose was to historicize Mike Johnson’s prejudices. On the contrary, I spend so much time scouring early modern texts because they also offer surprising examples of what can be called counter-natural logics, templates for how discourses of “nature” might be warped in surprising, unapologetically, subversively crip directions. Or at the very least, they self-consciously dramatize the concept’s role in consolidating power.
An indispensable example comes from the most famous of all premodern disabled figures: Shakespeare’s lame, hunchbacked, withered-armed Richard III, who announces to audiences straightaway that he is “curtailed of fair proportion,” “Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world” (1.1.18, 20-1). Other characters condemn his physical features mercilessly, constructing the kind of disability-like difference Bearden and others have so brilliantly limned. In one case, the lady Anne—whose husband, Edward, Richard has killed in the Wars of the Roses, but whom Shakespeare’s antihero now aims to marry—dubs him a “[f]oul devil” (50), compares him to an array of crabbed, crawling critters (spiders, toads, “any creeping venomed thing” [19-20]), and wonders what “black magician conjures up this fiend” (34), a “diffused infection of a man” (78). Most importantly, his “deeds, inhuman and unnatural, / Provokes this deluge”—her tears—“most unnatural” (60-1). Of course, Anne has good reasons to hate a character almost everyone agrees is wicked—though his violence becomes truly remarkable only when there’s no war to channel it—but by the end of the scene, she agrees to marry him. Why? Readers of the play have never quite settled on an answer. Certainly, Anne seems not to fear imminent danger, and surely she can’t be attracted to such a deformed “elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog” (1.3.227), as Richard’s stalwart adversary, the Lancastrian Queen Margaret, will eventually put it.
Critics have spilled a great deal of ink trying to make sense of the interpretive significance of such a hideous body to Shakespeare’s first great tragedy, including, in recent years, the brilliant disability scholars Allison Hobgood (49-78) and Katherine Schaap Williams (25-54). I’m much indebted to them. But my recent research on early modern tragedy argues that what Richard makes of other characters’ figures warrants as much of our attention: how he deflects, and in turn reveals the flexibility of, the rhetoric of unnaturalness so successfully that he forces interlocutors, like Anne, to realize why condemning his features may not be the winning strategy they think it is.
Consider, for instance, how Richard defends his truculent antics in the Wars of the Roses—such as killing Anne’s husband—by shifting the blame to the noblewoman herself. “Your beauty was the cause of that effect,” he insists, “Your beauty, which did haunt me in my sleep” (124-5). “Haunt” makes for a potent diction choice: Richard transforms Anne into an unnatural creature by suggesting that her beauty has become a monstrous presence capable of terrorizing others. The lady’s reaction to this epiphany even implicates her in Richard’s disabling attempts: if he speaks the truth, Anne will “rend that beauty from [her] cheeks,” which would only mar her further (124).
But Richard isn’t even close to finished, rejoining that “[i]t is a quarrel most unnatural, / To be revenged on him that loveth thee” (1.2.137-8). Explicitly, then, he condemns Anne as “unnatural.” Though she exhibits no diagnosable condition, Richard’s strategy brings her down to his level, at least rhetorically. So when she condemns him as a “fouler toad” who “infect[s] [her] eyes” (150, 151), he flips the insult around to explain, “Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine” (147). In other words, Shakespeare’s villain doesn’t refute that his nonnormative body might be infectious but applies those same standards to Anne. What he obliquely compels audiences/readers to consider in the process is how precarious the contrast between his monstrosity and others’ supposed normality truly is. My answer to the question of why Anne eventually accedes to Richard’s courtships is simple, then. She’s attracted to him, the ultimate bad, and ugly, boy; once he dispels any concerns about the incongruity of their naturalness, little more stands in the way of her (ostensibly perverse) desire.
I’ll have more to say about this scene in a forthcoming article (in Huntington Library Quarterly). But for the moment, we can’t omit the obvious objection: conniving Richard III is not a role model anyone should emulate uncritically. Or at all. Though he was important to the formulation of (early modern) literary disability studies, even its biggest names, like Tobin Siebers, have acknowledged the problem of making Richard its standard-bearer. And yet, for a disabled person like me—who wears hearing aids and lives with a spinal-cord injury, who remains profoundly self-conscious of his lumpy body and makes a daily practice of cursing the adipose tissue that encases it—Richard’s obvious sex appeal and confidently performed, nonnormative swagger wondrously underscores that beauty needn’t play by a single set of rules. And further, that Nature often has more to do with who can most effectively invoke its power than with any kind of immutable nature of things. In this sense, Richard’s approach to Anne is not so different from Mike Johnson’s to queer folks.
Which is all to say that even as Nature gained new, authoritative, providential traction in early modernity, Nature’s was never uncontested conceptual ground. And it certainly needn’t be today. Researchers have pointed out as much in studies that identify same-sex-erotic behavior in animals; Pete Buttigieg (whom I can’t help but admire) has insisted that conservatives’ true quarrel is with his Creator. And I’m thankful for these interventions, particularly since I can remember no time in my life when I didn’t feel the inexorable, innate tug of same-sex desire. But we must simultaneously excavate the contingent, endlessly pliable, discursive aspects of Nature too, shouting for all to hear that once Nature becomes a hard-edged standard, even the white, relatively ablebodied, straight, cisgender Mike Johnson might find that from one angle or another, he doesn’t measure up.
III.
What does this mean in practice, though? I don’t want to levy ad hominem attacks against Johnson in exactly the way Richard does against Anne, but I have no qualms following the king’s lead when it comes to destabilizing Johnson’s drivel in the aforementioned op-ed, “Marriage amendment deserves strong support,” for The Shreveport Times in 2004. He argues that the amendment in question offers Louisianans (78% of whom supported it) a chance “to define and protect marriage” as uniting only one man and one woman against “an assault on traditional values.” “Traditional” proves a close kinsman of “natural” here: what is right, proper, and tested by time. In this case, Nature necessitates that upstanding voters stand up “for decency and common sense” and “safeguard civilization’s oldest and most important institution.”
We might pause over any one of a number of illogical leaps he makes along the way, but I’ve already promised a Richardian approach, playing by the rules of one’s opponents, by “what the Bible has always said”: in Johnson’s words, “traditional marriage is unquestionably the best, healthiest, and most satisfying relationship for everyone.” Much like “traditional” above, “best,” “healthiest,” and “most satisfying” are firmly enclosed within the semantic pen of Nature, marking the inherent course of human development if nothing—say, the influence of cultural deviants—gets in the way.
Never mind that Johnson adduces no evidence to support his claim. There’s a bigger problem to confront. The Bible simply does not provide as unwavering a template for natural, traditional marriage as he indignantly claims that it does, at least not consistently. Ambivalence about what marriage is, its purposes and dynamics, rears its head from the very start with two versions of Adam’s and Eve’s creation. One emphasizes the imperative of multiplication (Gen. 1.28); the other, on Adam’s need for a “help meet” (Gen. 2.18), a bond between two adults that makes each better than they would have been otherwise. On this reading, it’s unclear whether marriage was ever a stable, fixed practice: it’s constantly being redefined. (Already in the seventeenth century, I should add, the friction between these two models was causing sparks to fly, and it took the genius of someone like John Milton to argue for the right to divorce on the grounds of the second.)
Another problem with Johnson’s unimaginative reading: for the most important author of the New Testament, it’s unclear whether marriage is all that healthy to begin with. In First Corinthians, St. Paul suggests that rather than be a God-given, natural institution, it is simply a venting mechanism for those unable to preserve the truly natural equilibrium of reason—love for God—over passion, or lust for another’s body (7.9). Marriage, as the least noxious way to have sex, is far from the “best” or most “satisfying”—in spiritual terms; Johnson doesn’t seem the type for droll double entendre—outcome for a Godfearing Christian. It might be exactly the thing that warps him out of alignment with the divine (32-3). Elsewhere, Paul even suggests that distinctions between the sexes no longer hold in the new nature invoked by Christ’s descent to earth. “There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he thunders (Gal. 3.28), hardly in keeping with Johnson’s chalky calcification of gender roles.
Jesus himself goes a step further down the path of anti-family rhetoric to claim that “[i]f any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14.26). This is not to say that the Bible provides no evidence to support Johnson’s interpretation, though plenty of scholars have explained that even Paul’s notorious denunciation of the malakoi and arseneokoitai in 1 Cor. 6.9 is no straightforward repudiation of so-called “practicing homosexuals.” But then again, I needn’t present a unified, comprehensive interpretation of scripture here; my job is only to show that Johnson’s apparently simple statement of the bare necessities of Christian naturalness is untenable.
For even if we accept marriage as inherently Godly, the question of children presents another problem. Johnson’s treatment of the subject implies that far more wedded people are defective than simply gay folks. In the op-ed, children seem the telos for which this entire institution of marriage was created. There is no explanation needed, then, for moving immediately from the reckless claim that “[c]ountless studies prove that traditional marriage is unquestionably the best … for everyone” to the notion that “[c]hildren in stable, traditional, two-parent homes have less physical and emotional problems,” and are better set-up for life in basically every way. But only the most unsophisticated understanding of embodiment, or marriage, would leave so little room for couples who cannot conceive. Or who cannot conceive without medical intervention. Or who choose not to go through the rigorous, expensive process of adoption. If Johnson were to call them unnatural too, at least I couldn’t fault him on the level of consistency, but I’d guess he wouldn’t, in which case, singling homosexuals out for their unnatural lifestyles seems less rooted in some ordained way of things than garden-variety phobia.
What’s more, according to Johnson’s standard of “nature” in the op-ed, divorce must surely be far more troubling than two queer people coming together with the promise of long-term commitment. If man and woman become “one flesh” through marriage (Gen. 2.24), then legally ending that union would—if we follow the metaphor’s logic—horrifically dismember the body of man/woman. To his credit, Johnson entered into a “covenant marriage” with his own wife, but his support for Donald Trump (and the former president’s lies about the 2020 election) suggests a strange disinterest in attacking the unnaturalness of divorced individuals, at least publicly—in sharp contrast to Jesus no less (Matt. 19.8). But Christ himself was raised by a step-father. There’s nothing normal about Christianity’s most central family unit—or the concept of the nuclear family itself, which is in many ways a creation of the Reformation (MacCulloch 594-8). New Testament scholar Carolyn Osiek, for instance, has pointed out that the Bible and early Christianity is larded with stories about husbands and wives laudably leaving their homes to follow Jesus (e.g., 136-40). Clearly they hadn’t read Johnson’s op-ed.
IV.
None of which means I didn’t benefit from my own nuclear family or from having a mother and a father committed to me and to one another or that, someday, I don’t want a wedding (likely in a church!) and family of my own. The value of these institutions (for which I have respect) is not my focus here; only that creating a normative standard of nature, and then weaponizing that standard against others, is a game two can play at until nothing or no one is natural any longer—a game that, therefore, catches out its own unreliability. It is not the pastime of serious, compassionate, loving (dare I say Godly) people, and after playing it to speak truth to power—to reveal Nature’s discursive lability—those of us who aspire to these adjectives mustn’t debase ourselves with it any longer. In the case of most sociocultural complaints, recourse to the “unnatural”—rather than concerns of consent or substantiated claims of danger in debates about marriage, say—is unacceptable shorthand.
And yet, we needn’t scrub our cultural conscience of the concept of nature—now lowercase, nonnormative—completely. For another, final way forward, we can again turn to early modernity, this time the French essayist Michel de Montaigne—an intellectual titan and titanic influence on Shakespeare—who uses nature to celebrate, rather than condescend to, the abundantly verdant diversity of humankind, each person’s “specific” essence (again to borrow from Daston). “We call that against nature which cometh against custom,” Montaigne keenly observes (Greenblatt 195). “There is nothing, whatsoever it be, that is not according to her. Let therefore this universal and natural reason chase from us the error and expel the astonishment which novelty breedeth and strangeness causeth in us.” I pray that Speaker Johnson can find it within himself to heed these words—and that, after working to destabilize Nature, the rest of us can too.
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Works Cited
Elizabeth B. Bearden, “Before normal, there was natural: John Bulwer, disability, and natural signing in early modern England and beyond.” PMLA 132.1 (2017): 33-50.
J.V. Cunningham, ed., The Renaissance in England (New York: Harcourt, 1966).
Lorraine Daston, Against Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019).
Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, ed., Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays: A Selection (New York: NYRB, 2014).
Allison P. Hobgood, Beholding Disability in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021).
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005).
Carolyn Osiek, Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press).
Janis L. Pallister, tr., Ambroise Paré, On monsters and marvels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).
Tobin Siebers, “Shakespeare Differently Disabled,” Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 435-54.
Katherine Schaap Williams, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).
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Image: Copper-alloy boar mount supposedly donned by an ally of Richard III, who took the white boar as his personal symbol—one that Queen Margaret turns into a cruel imprecation: “Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!” (1.3.227). Courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (LON-A33FF5), via CC BY 2.0, the image provided by Kate Sumnall, Finds Liaison Officer for Greater London. “The boar is chained and collared, is wearing a crown, and has a crescent moon on the top of one of its forelegs (indicating that its wearer was a second son). It is believed to be associated with King Richard III, and may have been attached to an item of leather clothing worn by one of the king’s supporters.”
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