Z WARSZTATÓW BADAWCZYCH : Lagry w perspektywie genderowej
RESEARCH OVERVIEW: The Camps from the Gender Perspective

Summary/Abstract: The questions of corporality, sexuality, women’s experience and their record examined in the context of camp issues and the Holocaust have only recently become the subject of attention. Gender studies play a significant role in the discussion on those issues. Existing works on the subject (i.a. the book of Bożena Karwowska Ciało. Seksualność. Obozy zagłady [Gender, Sexuality, Concentration Camps]) show that the tools of gender studies are cognitively useful, but, as it appears, their role of being particularly predestined to uncover what is marginalized or condemned to silence is overestimated. Nevertheless, apart from the dominance of the patriarchal discourse, there have always existed other reasons for suppressing the matter of corporality and sexuality both in works on KL’s and in science; social taboo (controlled not only by the male symbolical order) as well as the policy (e.g. it was possible to write openly about rape on former female prisoners by Soviet soldiers only after censorship had been lifted) play an important role here. The fundamental value of the gender perspective lies in the firm approach towards the issues hitherto marginalized in the KL context – both by science and, to a lesser extent, literature (which is reflected by i.a. works of Pankowski and Posmysz published years ago).

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