Gothic Muslim monsters are sexualized figures carrying displaced Western anxieties

Evidence

Gothic monsters are often sexual monsters. Zofloya is a Moorish Satan. Seductive and attractive, he is simultaneously repulsive and desirable. Vathek is queer, and when egged on by his dark-skinned Indian lover (a monster with green teeth and pasty, discolored skin), he becomes a sadomasochistic pedophile, murdering young naked boys in a homoerotic carnival of horror. Dracula sucks on the flesh of his victims, both male and female, adult and child, and his copulation with humans, like Othello’s with Desdemona, always carries the threat of monstrous offspring. Muslim monsters express “the conventional assortment of Gothic atrocities—incest, necrophilia, necromancy, murder, and other forms of abuse.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 430

Categorization

• DEFINE: Confirms the reader’s analytic category of the Muslim-as-sexual-monster, linking Zofloya, Vathek and Dracula as one recurring figure.
• XREF: Sexualized Oriental-monster figure echoes the analysis of Muslim-as-projector and cross-connects with the complaints-about-immodesty moral-panic article on how the West sexualizes what it fears. — connects to: Orientalist paintings fused titillation with disgust to justify Western rescue missions