Enlightenment critique domesticated monsters into pathological human degenerates
Evidence
The consequence of this [Enlightenment] critique is not the disappearance of the monster. During the Enlightenment, teratological galleries will remain an important category of the imagination. However, the monsters of modernity do not possess the same radical alterity of their classical and medieval predecessors but are rather the excrescence of an almost domestic world, mere deviations from the figures of normality. The sciences of physiognomy and criminology begin to describe, instead of sinners against God and nature, a constellation of degenerates, such as rapists. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 379
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s monster-scale thesis: how radical alterity degrades to domestic deviation across eras.
Related
- Modern monsters shed supernatural alterity yet persist as domesticized degenerates (similarity 0.91)
- Enlightenment-era monsters lost radical alterity and became domestic deviants (similarity 0.90)
- Enlightenment rationalism generated new monsters instead of eradicating them (similarity 0.86)
- Modern Muslim monsters rest on medieval fantasies (similarity 0.83)
- Enlightenment-era cruelty shifts from rulers onto the ruled. (similarity 0.83)
- Enlightenment and Romanticism both generated new Muslim monsters via different means (similarity 0.82)
- Orientalist monsters shifted from animal hybrids to demonized Muslim men (similarity 0.81)
- Gothic horror expanded Romantic vilification of Muslims into monstrousness as an anti-Enlightenment reaction. (similarity 0.81)
- Gothic literature expanded Romantic villainy into full-blown Muslim monsters (similarity 0.81)
- Enlightenment science created monsters that were not theologically constructed. (similarity 0.80)
- Enlightenment science and Romanticism both renewed medieval Muslim-monster fantasies rather than ending them (similarity 0.80)
- The Age of Exploration expanded rather than ended European monster-making (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval monster imagery persists in modern political discourse about Muslims. (similarity 0.79)
- Muslim monsters change across eras as symbols of particular anxieties (similarity 0.79)
- Muslim monsters were depicted as cannibals who ate their enemies. (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Orientalist monsters shifted from animal hybrids to demonized Muslim men
#expands(0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 378 - Torturers’ animalization of detainees mirrored the medieval monster image of Muslims
#exemplifies(0.70) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 744 - Medieval Muslim-monster imagery persists today through Gothic horror and Orientalism
#expands(0.65) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 75 - Enlightenment thinkers retained older anti-Muslim stereotypes
#corroborates(0.55) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 161