Cultural Studies paper by Vasvári, Louise O.
Hungarian Women's Traumatic Embodied Narratives of the Holocaust
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
I will examine how women of different cultural backgrounds narrate their Holocaust experiences pertaining particularly to [the loss of] their gender identity, and, more broadly, to female-centered “politics of the body.” I will discuss how gendered bodily experience is foregrounded in their recording of events about their physically and psychologically traumatized war experiences, illustrating that the human body is itself a politically enscribed entity. I will discuss, among others, the memoirs of two women from Transylvania, Gisella Perl, an Orthodox Jew and noted gynecologist, who with her bare hands aborted 1,500 fetuses in Auschwitz, and that of Olga Lengyel, who, in contrast, tried to deny her origins, but did write at length about sexual activity in the camp. I will also discuss the work of Edith Bruck, who unlike Perl and Lengyel, came from an impoverished shtetl background, and whose whole oeuvre is suffused with issues of women’s bodily experiences, beginning with her recounting of undergoing menarche at age twelve while enclosed in the cattle cars on the way to Auschwitz, to her postwar life ,where she willfully aborted numerous times. Bruck’s work also illustrates that bodily trauma, particularly that related to rape and to motherhood, did not end with the liberation, where many women had to struggle to restructure their gender identity.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Louise O. Vasvári, who received her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California in Berkeley, is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of Linguistics at Stony Brook University & Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at New York University. She has also taught in various visiting capacities, including at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Eotvos Lorand University and at the Central European University, the University of Connecticut (Storrs), and the Université de Jules Verne (Amiens), and Szeged. She works in medieval studies, historical and socio-linguistics, translation theory, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. She has recently published with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011). She has also published a monograph-length work in Hungarian on memoirs of Hungarian women survivors (2009),