Gothic horror monsters functioned as vessels for anxieties about women

Evidence

When these monsters emerged in the popular imagination, anxieties about women were on the rise. The Romantic movement inspired the genre of Gothic horror, which includes a corpus of frightening images related to femininity. Indeed, women are the “curious thread running through this labyrinth.” In one story, a dead infant is held by an incompetent mother; in another, a horrible female monster is created and then destroyed; and there are the murderous women, at times cast as Catholics (a sign of medievalism and decay) and at other times as Orientals, or immoral Christian women, who pay dearly for their slutty ways. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 354

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s core thesis: the Muslim monster is a container for what the West cannot face — here the same projection mechanism is aimed at women. Relevant to the reader’s question 3. — connects to: Female vampires threaten a propagation that needs no male seed — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1043
• SEED: Angles into an essay comparing how separate projection-vessels (woman-monster, Muslim-monster, beast) each carry a distinct Western fear — showing the monster taxonomy is really an anxiety taxonomy.