Medieval monster-makers and modern Terror TV both respond to market demand
Evidence
In the Middle Ages, theologians, artists, and clergy created and responded to the habitus—a disposition that included a belief in angels, demons, and monstrous races—by satisfying the demands of the market. According to Bourdieu, this “space of literary or artistic position-takings” is determined by a “structured set of the manifestations of the social agents in the field,” and it is the space in which literary and visual representations of Muslim monsters are produced. We can see this today, in a market filled with anti-Muslim material, from books about the “Islamic threat” to the advent of “Terror TV,” an entire genre of television shows that feature Muslim terrorists. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 69
Categorization
Category: Connection Points
- SEED: The continuity from medieval market-satisfying monster production to modern Terror TV is an essay angle on the manufacturing-of-fear thesis.
Related
- Medieval clergy manufactured monsters largely to satisfy a market habitus. (similarity 0.93)
- Modern Muslim monsters rest on medieval fantasies (similarity 0.80)
- Medieval monster imagery persists in modern political discourse about Muslims. (similarity 0.80)
- Muslim monsters change across eras as symbols of particular anxieties (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Muslim monsters were assembled from classical, biblical, and ethnic-other sources (similarity 0.79)
- Modern American media continues the medieval archive’s Muslim-monster archetypes (similarity 0.79)
- Each era’s monsters embody that era’s specific anxieties. (similarity 0.78)