Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Language, Body and Power

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

In recent years, studies of sexuality, sexual violence and gender have grown increasingly influential in the field of Holocaust Studies. Scholars such as Regina Mühlhäuser, Anja Hájková, Zoe Waxman, Robert Sommer, among many others, have illuminated the many forms of desire, sexual practice and experimentation, sexual barter, violence, eugenics and mutilation that were present in the Holocaust and previously undiscussed. Changes in present-day norms regarding sexuality and gender have added both new opportunities and new challenges: Current definitions of sexual violence, which encompass far more than the single act of rape, have motivated scholars to notice and analyze other, sometimes greyer types of sexual exploitation in the Holocaust. Along with this impulse to expand the definition of Holocaust sexual-violence, scholars have also cautioned against overusing the label, and thus misreading queer or feminine forms of desire that were once considered “violent” merely because they were taboo. This push and pull, between recognizing sexual violence in its many forms, but also not presuming that all non-traditional forms of intimacy in the Holocaust were violent, presents a moral quandary for scholars today. It also presents a problem of language—finding terms that acknowledge sexual victimization, but also do not entrench stigmas or apply standards anachronistically.
Holocaust sexuality also challenged language in real time, for the victims and prisoners in camps, ghettos and in hiding. First, the overall unprecedented nature of their torment made most previous forms of communication feel outdated. When it came to rape, mutilation and sterilization, preexisting social pressures to keep silent combined with the Holocaust crises of speakability. What is more, the relationship between embodiment and words itself changed during the Holocaust, with the starved, diseased body interrupting the verbal sphere in new ways. Despite all of these challenges, Holocaust prisoners and survivors did in fact speak about sex, albeit sometimes in new, awkward or indirect ways.
This panel attempts to shed new light on sexuality and sexual violence in the Holocaust —looking both at material realities as well as the challenges of verbalizing these realities, in the 1940s and now, in scholarship.

Sub Unit

• Holocaust Studies

Chair

• Dorota Glowacka, Univerity of King's College

Individual Presentations

• How Yiddish Dealt with Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: From Pipels to Kuzinkes - Hannah Pollin-Galay, Tel Aviv University

• Sexual(ized) Violence and the ‘Non-Absent’ Male Body: Castration and Sterilization in Auschwitz - William Jones

• The Language of Women’s Experience in Small Ghettos in Occupied Poland - Katarzyna Person, Warsaw Ghetto Museum

Respondent

• Dorota Glowacka, Univerity of King's College

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 05