US treatment of Muslim detainees derives from fantasies of Muslims as non-human

Evidence

Muslim men are so dehumanized that since 9/11 they have become less than zero, an example of Agamben’s “bare life,” reduced to bodies held indefinitely, stripped of all legal rights afforded under US domestic and international law, force-fed like animals. The stripping of identity, displays of sadomasochism and other sexual fantasies, and the manipulation of multiple bodies through hooding and piles of naked bodies are examples of biopower (the technology of power that manages human bodies). These acts recall terrible visions embedded in our collective historical memory, including “genocidal mass executions and graves.” Such crimes are not explained simply by the culture of the military industrial establishment. They are also an effect of fantasies about Muslims as non-human- An imperative point regarding the vocabulary used in this study is that the history of Muslim monsters is distinguished from what we think of as “Islamophobia,” the particularistic attitude toward Muslims that scholars have often described as an aversion to or “anxiety of Islam.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 21

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Agamben’s bare life and biopower concepts to the reader’s framing of civilizational dehumanization; parallels threads from earlier reading on sovereignty and the camp. — connects to: US officials instrumentalized racist Arab caricatures to design torture regimes — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 194
• QUESTION: Arjana asserts the causal link from monstrous fantasy to actual torture policy — worth chasing how she substantiates the ‘effect of fantasies’ mechanism across the later chapters.