Elizabethan culture framed black-white union as producing monstrous offspring.

Evidence

Miscegenation is a central theme in Othello, expressed in both the act of mixed-race sex and the horrors it could create. The image of Othello and Desdemona having sex is described as “an old black ram… tupping [a] white ewe” and “the beast with two backs.” This union would result in a family of monsters, illustrated in Iago’s warning that, “[y]ou’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins, and gennets for Germans.” Later in the play he issues another warning, stating: “Hell and Night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.” The repulsion surrounding the union of Othello and Desdemona is explicitly tied to the Moor’s identity as an African. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 316

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in the manufactured monster: the sexual-fear projection onto the Moor parallels the medieval Christian anxieties about Muslim flesh and sodomy mapped in Des Monstres (loc 314).
• SEED: Material for an essay angle on how the ‘mixed-race monster’ trope in Othello and its Russian review (loc 317-318) still underlies modern racialized fear discourse.