Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope: Negotiating the Intersections of Religion and Sexuality on Network Television's The Book of Daniel

Abstract

This article analyzes the television series The Book of Daniel, a program that shows in full relief the ways that current discourses of religion and sexuality converge to produce a particular type of gay subject. This subject, primarily male, might be understood as bound through an innate identity and commitment to the sanctity and reproduction of heteronormative institutions such as the church and state, which renders him assimilable into the social order. As homosexuality, per se, is no longer “outside” the normative order, the program constructs an unstable, nonbinary, and nonheteronormative other who is best understood as queer.