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On Women’s Bodies: Experiences of Dehumanization during the Holocaust

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Abstract

While there has been a plethora of analysis on diverse subjects within Holocaust studies, there remains some reluctance to engage with women’s unique experiences, which were largely subsumed under those of men in the decades following World War II. This article examines how women’s specific experiences, both biological and social, are often denied or suppressed in research and literature on the Holocaust, even in survivors’ own testimonies, despite the fact that these are often clearly gendered experiences. By revisiting key themes from the testimonies of female survivors, such gendered analyses contribute to a fuller picture of the unprecedented and relentless killing that the Final Solution’s anti-Semitism entailed.

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... In an article that explores dehumanization of Jewish women through the targeting of their bodies in concentration camps during the Holocaust, Nicole Ephgrave (2016) is successful in underscoring through a gendered-lens how Jewish women were discriminated in a sexualized manner. Ephgrave (2016) argues that Jewish women fell victim to high frequencies of sexual violence due to the distinct ways in which they were dehumanized using a sexualized rhetoric, and targeted in different ways to their male counterparts. It is argued that while Jewish women and men were both dehumanized, the Nazis discriminated the integrity of Jewish women's bodies, creating a gendered narrative that facilitated higher levels of sexual violence (Ephgrave 2016). ...
... Ephgrave (2016) argues that Jewish women fell victim to high frequencies of sexual violence due to the distinct ways in which they were dehumanized using a sexualized rhetoric, and targeted in different ways to their male counterparts. It is argued that while Jewish women and men were both dehumanized, the Nazis discriminated the integrity of Jewish women's bodies, creating a gendered narrative that facilitated higher levels of sexual violence (Ephgrave 2016). It is highlighted that sexual violence was not used in order to further the genocidal goals of the Nazi regime (Ephgrave 2016). ...
... It is argued that while Jewish women and men were both dehumanized, the Nazis discriminated the integrity of Jewish women's bodies, creating a gendered narrative that facilitated higher levels of sexual violence (Ephgrave 2016). It is highlighted that sexual violence was not used in order to further the genocidal goals of the Nazi regime (Ephgrave 2016). Instead, it was perpetrated due to misogynist ideology; a dehumanizing sexual rhetoric surrounding Jewish women's bodies enabled high levels of rape because soldiers objectified women, eradicating their femininity and further alienating them (Ephgrave 2016). ...
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The perpetration of sexual violence during armed conflict is a widely understudied topic in conflict studies, which has more recently gained the attention of scholars and researchers leading to a release of literature. Today, scholars are trying to understand why some conflicts experience higher frequencies of sexual violence than others, or why some armed groups perpetrate higher levels of sexual violence than other groups. However, there is a lack of literature discussing the role of hypersexualized propaganda with the intent to dehumanize a target ethnic group, and how this may lead to higher frequencies of sexual violence during ethnic conflicts or genocides. This study aims to holistically understand the impact of propaganda images released prior to a genocide, and how these cartoons influenced higher levels of sexual violence. I hypothesize that, when societies are deeply divided along ethnic lines, and have a long history of division (ex: through colonialism/neo-colonialism), the more that division is implemented through a gendered lens, and is done by devaluing and dehumanizing women, the more likely it will be that when conflict erupts, higher frequencies of sexual violence will be experienced. To evaluate my hypothesis, I utilize a single-case study approach to explore the Rwandan genocide, analyzing propaganda cartoons from extremist pro-Hutu magazines released prior to the ethnic conflict. Although this study finds commonalities between the hypersexualized rhetoric created through cartoon propaganda, and the actualities that occurred during the genocide, it cannot be concluded that extremist propaganda cartoons caused high levels of sexual violence in the genocide in Rwanda.
... As others have documented, the conscious inclusion of women's experiences in Holocaust histories was fostered by efforts that took root in the 1980s. The significance of women's words ("half the history of the Holocaust," per Kaplan 2019, 39) to a comprehensive telling of the Holocaust has since been well-established (Baumel-Schwartz and Baumel 1998;Ephgrave 2016;Hedgepeth and Saidel 2010;Kaplan 2019;Mühlhäuser 2021;Ofer and Weitzman 1998;Ringelheim 1985;Saidel 2004;Sinnreich 2008;Tec 2003). Women's ghetto experiences, including sexual violence and childbirth prohibitions, have also been documented (Chalmers 2015;Hedgepeth and Saidel 2010). ...
... Memories of sexual violence may be especially likely to remain unspoken in response." (Bergen et al. 2021, 504; see also Ephgrave 2016). 7 Silences around sexual violence and humiliation are not, however, uniform. ...
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This article focuses on Jewish women in the Nazi ghettos of German-occupied Latvia and Lithuania. It uses testimonies and memoirs of survivors to develop a narrative about life force atrocities at these sites, highlighting ways in which being a Jewish woman shaped the experience of the ghettos, where gendered risks were ubiquitous. Being a woman in the ghettos meant being both exploited and undervalued as a source of physical labor, targeted as a potential or actual bearer of children, and violated as an object of racist and sexist ideology and rage. Life force atrocities have physical and symbolic dimensions, targeting bodies, bonds, and norms of the community. This work considers what women’s accounts tell us about the presence – or ubiquity – of life force atrocities in the Baltic ghettos. It draws on the concepts of the universe of obligation and social death to highlight key roots and consequences of these atrocities for women. In testimonies and memoirs, we encounter themes of pregnancy, forced abortion, the wrenching loss of loved ones, sexual violence, and decisions made in the desperate hope of saving oneself or another. Survivor accounts are key to revealing life force atrocities as defining features of the Nazi ghettos, and the gendered risks faced by women prisoners in Nazi-occupied Riga, Daugavpils, and Kaunas.
... Byrd and Tharps (2001) and Thompson (2008) recount the indignities and erasure of cultural identities experienced by West African's during the slave trade whose heads were shaved as they were cargoed to the Americas. Ephgrave (2016: 22) writes on the dehumanisation of Jewish women during the Holocaust whose heads were forcibly shaved and the subsequent degradation this caused through the loss of individual, feminine and cultural identities whereby "[a]ge and other personal differences melt away". What these practices of forcible hair removal demonstrate is a capacity to re-inscribe other bodies as powerless and vulnerable. ...
... What these practices of forcible hair removal demonstrate is a capacity to re-inscribe other bodies as powerless and vulnerable. While Butler (1993) argues that gender and sex are written onto our bodies in complex ways, the process of forcibly removing hair attacks this sense of identity, exposing the vulnerable margins of the body, thus rendering it 'identity-less' (Ephgrave, 2016). ...
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This paper extends discussions of the geographies of the body by examining hair as a geographical lens that reimagines the body’s borders. Hair is a key agent in producing and representing the body, specifically through the presences and absences of hair that influence, disturb, transform and transcend its margins. By examining the materialities, performances and discourses associated with how and where hair is situated (or not) on the body, this paper situates hair as a geographical prism that explores new frontiers of the bordered body, shapes corporeal understandings of appearance and projects identities and power well beyond its physical limits.
... The loss of agency over one's own body and the expropriation of one's femininity create a profound sense of desperation and internal destruction (Barber et al., 2016). This psychological state increases vulnerability to further subjugation and, ultimately, elimination (Ephgrave, 2016). ...
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This article employs socio-cultural theories to analyse the psycho-social effects of Gazan women cutting their hair during the2023–2024 Gazacide. The severe conditions in Gaza, exacerbated by a lack of sanitation and essential resources due to the ongoing blockade, have forced women into extreme precarity. This has led to the compulsory act of hair-cutting as a measure for disease prevention. The act of cutting hair, which disrupts a universally recognised symbol of beauty and health, highlights the broader socio-political crisis. The paper critiques Western feminism for its selective empathy, noting its neglect of Gazan women’s suffering while focusing on issues pertinent to Western contexts. By framing hair-cutting not as individual psychological distress but as a response to aggravated socio-political conditions, the article underscores how this act reflects the broader dehumanisation and suffering imposed by the ongoing genocide.
... Goldenberg and Shapiro's edited collection addresses the absence of gender in historical analyses (2013). Further studies focusing on gender and the Holocaust thus, continue to be crucial, with texts like "On Women's Bodies: Experiences of Dehumanization during the Holocaust" (Ephgrave 2016), Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust (2010), Haunted Memories: Portraits of Women in the Holocaust (Eichengreen 2011) andDifferent Horrors, Same Hell (2013) appearing just in the last ten to fifteen years. With regard to Shoah, the absence of gender was explored by Hirsch and Spitzer, as were images by Koch in the influential anthology Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays (Liebman 2007). ...
Article
The original version of the film Shoah had an enormous impact on the revival of Holocaust memory. However, women appeared only a few times over the course of those nine long hours. Even though Lanzmann’s film achieved complexity in its representation of places, it failed to equally represent the experiences of both women and men, which is a disservice to all survivors. In 2016, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) released over 220 hours of additional outtake footage from Shoah, never seen by the public. The outtakes reveal longer interviews with women, and these missing voices shed light on women’s experiences during the Holocaust in more detail. I argue that the “outtakes” of this film can be used by audiences to deconstruct gender “neutralities” around testimony to reimagine public memory narratives and spaces about the Holocaust as highly gendered. In the “rhetorical process of gendering” in public memory, so-called “neutral” public memory narratives can be challenged by newly discovered artifacts like the outtakes. Though Shoah had elements of ambiguity, there was no way to challenge its strict binary in gender representation— until now. This active audience engagement with Holocaust artifacts, what I call performative memorialization, marks a kairotic force in Holocaust memorialization; the past collapses into the present to elicit a dialogic of active audience participation.
... In this way, the Nazis manipulated and exploited the gendered traits of women as a source of dehumanization (Waxman, 2017: 149). Thus, we need to address the fact that biological vulnerability and socially constructed roles resulted in gendered methods of terror, which particularly violated women's bodily integrity (Ephgrave, 2016). ...
Article
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This paper intends to unravel the nexus between sexual violence and silence in textual and figurative silence in female Holocaust survivors’ writing. I will argue that these tropes allow authors to acknowledge and explore the nature of a gender-specific trauma. The sources under examination encompass Ruth Klüger (2001), Gisella Perl (1948), Judith Magyar-Isaacson (1990), Judith Dribben (1970) and Elzbieta Ettinger (1986), whose works significantly delve into these unspoken realms. I suggest that the tension between the endured sexual violence and the challenges of bearing witness to it is mirrored in these silences, which are infused with narrative strategies that gender the Shoah, illustrate embodied experience and reclaim the victim’s agency. Though feminist Holocaust scholarship has recently turned its focus to the study of sexual violence, its imbrication with silence merits further scrutiny. My approach provides a new framework to stimulate this discussion by igniting the reflection on literary silences.
... Scholarship on consumerism in Eastern bloc countries has studied gendered patterns of customary activities and the symbolism of material things, including fashion (Bartlett 2010, Zalewska 2017). Discussions about the relationship between war and gendered corporeality in Eastern Europe's violent 20th century have gained substantial attention, particularly by Holocaust historians examining sexual and sexualized violence against Jewish women (Ephgrave 2016, Mühlhäuser 2017 and other gendered bodily experiences in the context of genocidal violence (Von Kellenbach 1999). Additionally, contemporary scholarship has delved into issues related to corporeality and gender, ...
... 11 Women were vilified as breeders of undesirables, as threats to Aryanism. 11 Gay men, and to a lesser degree lesbian women, were treated as vectors of sexual depravity, criminality, and illness; they were persecuted by law, unwittingly subjected to psychiatric experimentation, and assigned to brutalizing hard labor. 12 Medicalized dehumanization also affected the Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's witnesses, and political dissidents seen as traitors. ...
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Critical lessons can be gleaned by examining 2 of the most salient relationships between racism and medicine during the Holocaust: (1) connections between racism and dehumanization that have immediate, lethal, deleterious, longer-term consequences and (2) intersections of racism and other forms of hatred and bigotry, including discrimination against people with disabilities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people; and social and religious minorities. When considered in the US context, these lessons amplify need for reflection about the history of eugenics and human experimentation and about the persistence of racism and ableism in health care.
... Women who survived the Holocaust (the camps of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, in particular) have left a record for future generations that should not be overlooked but instead should be explored and emphasized. 33 Women's Holocaust writing is a diverse body of literature that includes memoirs, wartime diaries and journals, fiction, drama, and poetry. Not all of the writers are Jewish or identified as such, and not all are identified as feminist or provide resources for feminist thought. ...
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This article presents a feminist thematic reading of three diaries written by young women and girls during World War II. The diaries were written by Anna Frank, Hélène Berr, and Ruth Maier, and have not yet been comparatively studied. The thematic reading presented here has focused on four super-themes characterizing the diary-keeping of women during the Holocaust – love, writing, war, and the status of women.
Chapter
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This chapter analyzes how Ukrainian artists engage with landscape, starting from the Soviet colonial landscape and concluding with the contemporary Ukrainian one. In 1994, William John Thomas Mitchell called for the abandonment of landscape art, arguing that it was a thoroughly colonial and European genre. However, even if we accept the colonial nature of the genre, there is a space for rethinking and reinventing it, which can lead to the emergence of a new environment, landscape, and identity. In Ukrainian art, these processes occur in parallel and sometimes influence one another. For instance, the denaturalization of the official Soviet landscape becomes a central theme in the artistic practices of Lada Nakonechna and Nikita Kadan. At the same time, the hybrid phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which started in 2014, and the subsequent full-scale Russian invasion, beginning on February 24, 2022, have triggered a strong interest in landscape, as evidenced by numerous artworks created during the war. The author examines the works of Alevtina Kakhidze, Kateryna Aliinyk, and Kateryna Buchatska to track changes in the landscape following Russia’s full-scale invasion. The depletion of the earth’s resources, the ideological construction of environmental topography, and landscape’s role as both a participant in the war and its battleground have become prominent motifs in the artworks, which I will address in my contribution.
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Beginning with early studies in the 1970s, dehumanisation has become a key feature in attempts to grasp the fundamental dynamics and conditions under which mass atrocities emerge. One of the most long-standing, prominent and widely accepted conceptions sees the loss of moral status as a key constitutive component of processes of dehumanisation, suggesting that the victims’ exclusion from the moral universe of obligation breaks down moral barriers, enabling forms of persecution outside the established practices of violence among human communities. With reference to the paradigmatic case of the Holocaust, this article critically interrogates this so far unquestioned equation of a loss of moral standing with dehumanisation. Overall, it argues for a much more nuanced differentiation between normative and analytical uses of dehumanisation, the need for more detailed reflections on its empirical appearances and relevance, and a more critical engagement with its conceptual grounding. Doing so will lead dehumanisation research beyond its current state and would allow for a more intricate assessment of its uses, meanings and relevance in cases of mass violence.
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Exploring the Holocaust through a gendered lens, this article examines linguistic aggression against women in Nazi concentration camps. While extensive scholarship connects language to genocide, the imbrication between gender, language and genocide remains an under-researched subject. To further this discussion, I analyze female survivors’ memoirs to explore the processes of semantic deprecation through metaphorization. Relying on cognitive semantics ( Lakoff and Johnson 1980 ), I concentrate on euphemistic and dysphemistic metaphors that construct women’s identities in terms of otherness, by means of zoosemic and reifying conceptualizations, among others. The sources under examination encompass Jewish survivors Liana Millu (2001) ; Gisella Perl (2019) , and Anne-Lise Stern (2004) , and non-Jewish resisters Margarete Buber-Neumann (2008) ; Wanda Półtawska (1989) , and Germaine Tillion (1997). Considering the relationship between metaphorical language and perceived stereotypes about women and the feminine, and focusing on specific lexical items, I hope to unravel the nexus between linguistic aggression and patriarchal structures in the concentration camp system. I argue that metaphorization reinforced women’s inferior position and perpetuated gender stereotypes. I suggest that, paradoxically, this violence also triggered empowering processes of linguistic reappropriation, asserting the victims’ agency.
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