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Gendering the language of genocide

Linguistic violence against women in Nazi concentration camps

ORCiD logo with link | Universitat de València, Spain
Published online: 3 June 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00111.min
Abstract
Exploring the Holocaust through a gendered lens, this article examines linguistic aggression against women in Nazi concentration camps. While extensive scholarship connects language to genocide, the imbrication between gender, language and genocide remains an under-researched subject. To further this discussion, I analyze female survivors’ memoirs to explore the processes of semantic deprecation through metaphorization. Relying on cognitive semantics (Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), I concentrate on euphemistic and dysphemistic metaphors that construct women’s identities in terms of otherness, by means of zoosemic and reifying conceptualizations, among others. The sources under examination encompass Jewish survivors Millu, Liana. 2001. Smoke over Birkenau. Illinois: Varda Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Perl, Gisella. 2019. I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, and Stern, Anne-Lise. 2004. Le savoir-déporté. Camps, histoire, psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, and non-Jewish resisters Margarete Buber-Neumann, Margarete. 2008. Under two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler. London: Pimlico.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Półtawska, Wanda. 1989. I Am Afraid of My Dreams. New York: Hippocrene Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, and Germaine Tillion (1997). Considering the relationship between metaphorical language and perceived stereotypes about women and the feminine, and focusing on specific lexical items, I hope to unravel the nexus between linguistic aggression and patriarchal structures in the concentration camp system. I argue that metaphorization reinforced women’s inferior position and perpetuated gender stereotypes. I suggest that, paradoxically, this violence also triggered empowering processes of linguistic reappropriation, asserting the victims’ agency.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Gendering the Holocaust
  • 3.The data and method
    • 3.1Corpus of analysis
    • 3.2Theoretical framework and procedure of analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Euphemistic metaphors
    • 4.2Dysphemistic metaphors
    • 4.3Reappropriation
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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Hatzidaki, Ourania
2024. “I’ll throw acid on your pretty little face […], so wrote a genteel fanatic antifeminist”. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict DOI logo

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