Sexuality in the concentration camps: Aspects of an enforced female relationship

This is a joint session with the History of Sexuality Seminar.

This talk explores the intersection of queer and Holocaust history through the example of an enforced relationship between two women, a guard and a Jewish woman, in a concentration camp in winter 1945. This coerced relationship raises issues of sexual violence, sexual barter, and homophobia. Based on survivors’ testimonies, postwar trials, and reparation files, Anna Hájková will show how a queer history of the Holocaust allows us to address agency and powerlessness of Holocaust victims.

Dr Anna Hájková is Associate Professor of modern European continental history at the University of Warwick. Her work examines society and everyday life in concentration camps; Jewish social and political elites; issues of nationalism and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; and the Jewish Councils. Her prize-winning first book was The Last Ghetto: An everyday history of Theresienstadt, and her current research projects are titled Boundaries of the Narratable: Transgressive Sexuality and the Holocaust, and Dreamers of a New Day: Building Socialism in Central Europe, 1930-1970.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.