In 300, racial difference is rendered as bodily monstrosity and moral corruption

Evidence

The monstrosity of the Persians is primarily based on racial difference, although hideous sexual behaviors also come into play. They are monsters that deviate from bodily normativity. Ephialtes’s monstrosity is predicated on his physical disability, but he is only one of many deformed and punished bodies. In B. J. Chaplin’s excellent study of the film, he argues that disability is used in 300 to represent ” ‘particular bodies in particular societies’ and ‘moral deficiency.’ ” King Xerxes wins Ephialtes over (to the dark side) when the two meet at the king’s harem, in a carnivalesque scene of disfigured lesbians, disfigured Persians (including Persians missing limbs), a human with a goat’s head, lots of moaning, and a good dose of Orientalist costumes and nudity. Xerxes promises “all the pleasures of the world” to Ephialtes, who agrees, kneels before him in a suggestive pose and then issues a series of grunts before he sets off to betray the Spartans. This scene is one of the reasons the film has been described as a phantasmagoria. It also plays out a long list of Western fantasies of the harem—homosexuality, lesbianism, orgasmic delights, and monsters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 675

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the author’s earlier chapters on the Muslim monster manufacturing machinery — this is the modern visual incarnation of the medieval tribal-tale monster the reader is tracking. Also ties to Said’s Orientalist harem fantasy.
• SEED: Article angle: the somatic coding of evil — how disability, racial difference, and ‘deviant’ sexuality get fused into one monster package in modern film, a direct descendant of medieval grotesque bodies.