Specularizing Otherness normalizes killing the racialized enemy.
Evidence
Otherness is coded in the presentation of the Tusken Raiders, which serves to normalize the lead human characters and the attributes associated with them. The Tusken Raiders exist as a spectacle of Otherness throughout the Star Wars saga who revel in violence, shooting pod racers across the desert, attacking Luke, torturing Anakin’s mother, which position them as villains and bolster Anakin’s violent actions against them. When Anakin kills them, it is constructed as greatly out of his character and necessary while simultaneously normalizing the relationship between the Tusken Raiders violence and Otherness. Therefore, the narrative is further constructed for Anakin as the symbol of White hegemonic masculinity to naturally kill the Others, the “Sand People”. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 609
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Speaks to the reader’s core mechanism question — how the image is manufactured. The spectacle of Otherness directly generates justifiable violence, the same causal loop found in medieval crusade narratives.