Monsters define humanity by demarcating its exclusionary boundary

Evidence

Monsters serve an important function in the construction of identity as characters against which we define ourselves, our normative behaviors and customs, and the larger community in which we live. This study is a teratology of Islam—a study of Muslim monsters: “Teratology thus makes possible a critical purchase on the processes of definition and exclusion by which the boundaries of what it means to be (authentically) human are drawn. What we are seeing is not essentialist doctrines of ‘human nature’ therefore, but the discourses and devices by which they are articulated. For every assertion of the definitively ‘human’ there is a refracted ‘other’—the almost human, the monster, the alien—who shows the workings of the principles by which normative and exemplary humanity is defined.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 52

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: This is the teratology method itself: the definitional core of the book, establishing the analytical category for every monster figure examined later.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that every claim to the ‘human’ requires a refracted almost-human other — is the paradigm-shifting spine of the whole teratology project, not just a definition.

Related

• Defining the monster exposes the principles by which a community defines humanity. (similarity 0.96)
• Monsters both enforce and expose the fragility of human boundaries (similarity 0.86)
• Monstrous figures both police and expose the fragility of human boundaries. (similarity 0.81)
• Monsters function as a tableau for fears that shapes identity formation (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christian identity defined itself as normative humanity with all else monstrous (similarity 0.79)