Cognitive Penetration and Monstrification:

Legal Encounters and Implicit Fears in Conservative Muslim Immigrant Life in Sweden

Abstract

Research on monstrification has broadly examined how Western rhetoric targets
marginalized groups, including Muslim immigrants. Much less attention has
focused on how religiously conservative Muslim immigrants, especially those
affected by war, displacement, and trauma, may develop their own forms of
counter-monstrification in response to exclusion in the host society. Drawing on
Sweden as a case study, this conceptual article calls for a bilateral approach to
monstrification. It employs the cognitive penetration framework, which holds that
prior beliefs, fears, and cultural worldviews shape social perception. Because many
religious communities accept the existence of supernatural beings, monstrification
in such contexts cannot be understood solely as a rhetorical process. To explore
this dynamic, the article turns to historical periods in which belief in supernatural
beings was widespread. Two Swedish court cases from the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries involving alleged encounters with the folk monsters Näcken and the
Skogsrå illustrate how Christian legal authorities used such beliefs to reinforce
institutional power and collective identity. The article proposes that analogous
perceptual dynamics may arise within some Muslim subgroups in Sweden
and argues that unaddressed fears of otherness may heighten vulnerability to
extremist actors seeking to position themselves as alternative authorities. Finally,
it suggests that drawing on the complexity of historical folkloric monsters in
contemporary monster-film genres may allow cinema to mediate implicit fears
within marginalized communities.