The invented rape-of-the-Virgin-Mary fantasy persists in modern anti-Muslim discourse

Evidence

In medieval texts, female Muslim monsters typically appear as black, blue, or purple-skinned giants, equally as frightening as their male counterparts. These characters exemplify the “hybridization of misogyny and racism through a triple confluence of representations: the wild woman, personified vice, and ‘death itself, la mort, feminized through grammatical gender.’ ” In contrast to later female Muslim characters, most of whom are desirable, most medieval monsters have zero sex appeal. Amiete, a Saracen giantess that appears in Fierbras, with her huge mouth and wide hips, is sexually monstrous but not “sexy”: Ce est une gaiande plus noire que peuree; Grant ot la fourceure et le quele avoit lee Les ex avoit plus rouges que n’est flambé alumee; Flohart, another Saracen giantess found in Aliscans, is even more terrifying. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 189 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Abu Ghraib abuses stem from centuries of anti-Muslim discourse; History invents phantasms — fantasies attached to Muslim bodies — that remain powerful; Anti-Muslim rhetoric was founded in the Middle Ages and persists into today (+9 more)

Related

• Medieval female Muslim monsters fused misogyny and racism (similarity 0.84)
• Modern Islamophobic rhetoric manufactures sexualized fantasies about Muslim men (similarity 0.79)
• Muslim males in Gothic horror are framed as essentially evil, deviant, and child-murdering (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Muslim sexual monstrosity fantasies persisted from medieval claims into the colonial croco-sapien #expands (0.75)
• The War on Terror weaponizes an invented Orientalist past to victimize Muslims today #expands (0.70)
• Medieval female Muslim monsters fused misogyny and racism #expands (0.65) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 189
• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman #qualifies (0.60) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292
• The oppressed-Muslim-woman trope emerged in 18th-19th century Europe, not earlier #complicates (0.55)
• Colonial conquest history planted rape fantasies in European dreams about Algerian women #corroborates (0.50)