Gender and Sexuality in Women Survivors’ Personal Narratives

Abstract

Over the past four decades, gender-specific differences in personal narratives from the Holocaust have been the subject of heated academic debate and there is a growing body of research on manifestations of gender and sexuality in personal camp narratives. While Lawrence Langer, a leading scholar in the study of Holocaust testimonies, sought to counter nascent feminist research in the field by asserting the ‘severely diminished role that gendered behaviour played during those crucial years’ (1998, p. 13), his position has in turn been rejected in recent studies by Hutton (2005), Waxman (2006) and in the coedited volume by Hedgepeth and Saidel (2010), who variously argue for women’s distinct experiences in the camps or distinct narrative patterns derived from female socialization.