Modern monsters shed supernatural alterity yet persist as domesticized degenerates

Evidence

With a few exceptions, the monsters of Orientalism are radically different from their predecessors—human-animal hybrids, sea monsters, and the like were replaced by images of Muslim men as morally depraved and hyper-violent villains. This was not the end of monsters, but rather a transitory period that re-defined them: … The consequence of this [Enlightenment] critique is not the disappearance of the monster. During the Enlightenment, teratological galleries will remain an important category of the imagination. However, the monsters of modernity do not possess the same radical alterity of their classical and medieval predecessors but are rather the excrescence of an almost domestic world, mere deviations from the figures of normality. The sciences of physiognomy and criminology begin to describe, instead of sinners against God and nature, a constellation of degenerates, such as rapists. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 378

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key transition: monsters move from ‘sinners against God and nature’ to physiognomic ‘degenerates’ — a crucial categorical shift in the Muslim-monster archive.
• XREF: Connects to Michel Foucault’s ‘abnormal’ lectures and the shift from monster to degenerate/anomaly in criminology and psychiatry. — connects to: The category of the grotesque originally named human-animal-plant hybrids defying classical logic