Abu Ghraib abuses stem from fantasies of Muslims as nonhuman
Evidence
Muslim men are so dehumanized that since 9/11 they have become less than zero, an example of Agamben’s “bare life,” reduced to bodies held indefinitely, stripped of all legal rights afforded under US domestic and international law, force-fed like animals. The stripping of identity, displays of sadomasochism and other sexual fantasies, and the manipulation of multiple bodies through hooding and piles of naked bodies are examples of biopower (the technology of power that manages human bodies). These acts recall terrible visions embedded in our collective historical memory, including “genocidal mass executions and graves.” Such crimes are not explained simply by the culture of the military industrial establishment. They are also an effect of fantasies about Muslims as non-human- An imperative point regarding the vocabulary used in this study is that the history of Muslim monsters is distinguished from what we think of as “Islamophobia,” the particularistic attitude toward Muslims that scholars have often described as an aversion to or “anxiety of Islam.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 21
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s question 3 — what the monster lets its makers avoid seeing about themselves. Connects to Agamben’s bare life concept and biopower via Foucault.
- ADDENDUM: Could support ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind’ — the dehumanization underlying biopolitical control of bodies parallels the framing of sacrificial bodies as less-than-human.
Related
- Abu Ghraib abuses stem from centuries-old anti-Muslim monster imagery, not aberrance (similarity 0.86)
- US treatment of Muslim detainees derives from fantasies of Muslims as non-human (similarity 0.86)
- Muslims are so dehumanized they are treated as bare life (similarity 0.85)
- Sexualized medieval fantasies were enacted on real Muslim bodies at Abu Ghraib (similarity 0.85)
- Imaginary dehumanization of Muslims links to real violence against them (similarity 0.85)
- Abu Ghraib required both cultural monsters and institutional dehumanization (similarity 0.84)
- The Muslim-monster fantasy only partially explains Abu Ghraib’s atrocities (similarity 0.82)
- Public dehumanization of Muslims made their torture acceptable state practice. (similarity 0.79)
- Fictional violence against Muslim monsters sanctions real violence against Muslim bodies (similarity 0.79)
- The medieval Muslim monster imaginary directly enables modern atrocities against Muslims (similarity 0.78)
- Popular torture imagery in American media normalized real torture of Muslims abroad. (similarity 0.78)