Shame is a ubiquitous part of the discourse around sexual violence; one of the most pervasive images of sexual violence within patriarchal cultures is that women are ashamed of having been raped. This paradigm has also dominated research approaches to sexual violence and the Holocaust. Scholars have suggested that shame is inescapable (Dror and Linn, 2010), that it has resulted in silence (Shik 2008; Levenkron, 2010), and that any allusions toward memories of sexual violence given by survivors are covert and offered without detail, echoing their personal modesty or shame (Hedgepeth and Saidel, 2010) around this taboo (Sinnreich, 2008).
Using audiovisual testimony interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, this paper explores the emotion(s) in personal memory narratives of Jewish women who experienced sexual violence during the Holocaust. Building on the earlier work of Kraft (2002, 2004) and Baldwin (2010), I identify emotion(s) embodied by survivors in the moment of remembering as well as the remembered emotion(s) that survivors describe as part of their narrative. How do these specific moments of remembering sexual violence compare to the survivor's wider personal Holocaust narrative? By examining the relationship between these emotional points, I will highlight how these women embody and recollect memories of sexual violence beyond feelings of shame.
My approach will deepen our understanding of individual experience as reflected in personal testimonies of survivors, while challenging the dominant analysis of women Holocaust survivors who also experienced sexual violence as a homogenous group in terms of their long-term emotions (shame) around these specific memories. Through investigating the emotions involved in the recounting of personal memories this project has the potential to 'expand the dialogue between personal memory and history writ large' (Shenker, 2015, p.149), as well as contribute to our understanding of how taboos may be narrated (Hájková, 2018).
