Challenging the Shame Paradigm: Jewish Women’s Narratives of Sexual(ized) Violence During the Holocaust

An online lecture by Lauren Cantillon (PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King’s College London, UK)
2020-2021 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Cosponsored by the USC Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies

For decades now, researchers have carved out space in which to examine the nature of sexual(ized) violence during the Holocaust, establishing that conditions of genocide left Jewish women, girls, men, and boys vulnerable to such abuses and that these abuses happened. Alongside this, scholars have been keen to explore why (some) survivors remained silent about their memories of sexual(ized) violence, often connecting this silence to feelings of shame. Shame is a ubiquitous part of the wider discourse around sexual(ized) violence, yet as Regina Mühlhäuser (2020) has pointed out, "defining the primary harm caused by sexual violence in terms of stigma and shame brings further problems. It reinforces the alleged inevitability of shame as a natural response by the individual victim […], it assumes that families and communities will always shame and stigmatize the victims."

In this talk, Lauren Cantillon will explore the tensions and textures of emotions present in Jewish women’s personal memory narratives of sexual(ized) violence during the Holocaust. Drawing on interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, she will highlight some of the numerous Jewish women who shared their stories within the context of a Holocaust testimony interview. The multimodal nature of the interviews within the VHA offers the chance to examine how spoken words intersect with embodied manifestations of the same memory: what emotions may we observe in the moment of recounting? What emotions are verbally recounted as part of an individual’s narrative? Are they the same, or different?

Another aspect of her research she will discuss is her investigation into how personal stories of sexual violence interact with and are embedded within an individual’s wider Holocaust narrative. She will also reflect on how the VHA’s indexing system shapes her work and impacts wider access to first-hand accounts of sexual(ized) violence during the Holocaust.

Lecture image above is a detail from "Roll Call!" by Ella Liebermann-Shiber. Courtesy of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Art Collection.