Enlightenment-era monsters lost radical alterity and became domestic deviants

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

• DEFINE: Defines the pivotal shift: the figure of the Other moves from supernatural alterity to a domesticized deviation, reframing how the Muslim monster gets manufactured.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that the abandonment of supernatural monsters did not retire the monster category but internalized it into criminology/physiognomy as ‘degenerates’ is a nuanced theoretical pivot — Enlightenment rationality didn’t abolish othering, it relocated it into pseudo-scientific classification.
• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment-era cruelty shifts from rulers onto the ruled.