Medieval racialization wrote ethnic anxieties onto Muslim bodies as overlapping afflictions

Evidence

Anxieties surrounding ethnicity and bodily differences were imprinted on non-Christian bodies, in particular, on Jews, Muslims, and Africans. This was a medieval kind of racialization, characterized by Cohen as “a phenomenon of multiple category overlap rather than a distinctly verifiable or measurable ‘thing’… (that is, race has no independent ontology), and race is therefore always written on and produced through the body (race is nonetheless biological).” This medieval “multiple category overlap” echoes Foucault’s argument that human bodies are determined by the “effects of power.” Muslim monsters are punished bodies, often suffering with more than one disease or affliction. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 102

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to modern monster-construction literature and to Foucault’s biopolitics; the body-as-punished-surface recurs in analyses of colonial and racial imagery. — connects to: Crusade rhetoric racialized Muslims as a vile and accursed race. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 12; Medieval anti-Muslim prejudice was protoracism, not full modern racism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 121
• DEFINE: Gives the analytical category of medieval racialization as multiple category overlap written on the body.