Accusations of monstrous sodomy justified colonial expansion against Jews, Africans, and Muslims

Evidence

Abu Ghraib is part of the archive of Muslim monsters. Like the spectacle of foreign bodies formulated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which continued to be seen during the colonial age, the images of Muslim bodies that emerged from the prison are situated in a mixed-up milieu of sexual desire and repulsion. The fact that so many of the photographs are fixated on sodomy is not lost on scholars. As Nicholas Mirzeoff writes, “[that] the whole indigenous population was composed of sodomites served as a means of justifying and necessitating early colonial expansion in the Atlantic world,” which in discourse about the goods of slavery represented Jews and Africans as “sodomitical.” Muslims have often been viewed this way, as having a bizarre sexuality, or even being sexual monsters, what used to be described as sodomia. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 753

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ADDENDUM article on moral panics over immodesty/sexuality as identity signaling — here the same impulse scales up to justify empire.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing how the specific claim of sodomy-as-justification transfers across each targeted group — Jew, African, Muslim.