Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences
Congress 2006
York University, Toronto (Ontario) Canada
The Congress encourages community participation.
Session Sponsored by the Society for Socialist Studies & co-listed by the
Canadian Women’s Studies
Title: New (Gendered) Perspectives on Genocide
When: May 31, 2006 1 PM; Where: AWC
Session co-organizers: Karin Doerr & Sima Aprahamian
Email: kdoerr@alcor.concordia.ca; aprhsma@alcor.concordia.ca
Full Institutional Affiliation (if applicable): Karin Doerr, Simone de
Beauvoir Institute & Modern Languages H-663
Sima Aprahamian, Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Sociology-Anthropology
H1125-58 Mailing Address: Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West
Montreal, QCH3G 1M8, Canada
1. Isabel Kaprielian (California State University at Fresno,
Department of History)
“Girls at Risk: the Survival of Armenian girls during the Genocide”
In research and writing relating to the Armenian Genocide, great emphasis
has been placed on the political, economic, and religious factors leading
to the tragedy and on the terrible events that destroyed 1 1/2 million
Armenians. Less emphasis has been placed on the expereinces of survivors.
This paper will focus on the survival experiences of Armenian girls –
those abducted, those raped, those exploited, those who survived with
family members, and those fortunate enough to be placed in the many
orphanages set up to save them. I will be using oral sources, published
memoirs, and official reports by missionaries, Near East Relief personnel, and
League of Nations agencies.
2.Karin Doerr (Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Modern Languages H-663, Concordia
University) “A Critical Approach to Women and the Holocaust”
This paper addresses possible reasons for mainstream Holocaust Study’s
continued neglect of women’s issues and work in the field and articulates
possible solutions. It concurs with the existing critical re-examination
of work on women in the Holocaust and suggests avoiding romanticization of
the female victim or the heroine as well as an exclusionary, care-oriented
focus (Bernard, 1995; Ringelheim, 1985, 1999). It builds on the call to
explore the ethical dimension of women’s behaviour in the politically
resistive area of the “Gray Zone” (Primo Levi, 1986; Nowack, 1999; Claudia
Card. 2002) and warrants taking a closer look at the circumstances that
created the abject conditions, the fear, terror, and murder that the women
experienced and to which they responded. Moreover, since a feminist lens
allows for a multi-focal approach, we need to consider survival chances
based on nationality, class, and political or religious affiliation in
addition to gender. Finally, it argues against a continued separation of
research with Women and the Holocaust as a category of its own.
3.Victoria Rowe (Faculty of Policy Studies,Chuo University, Japan)
“Public Witnessing at the League of Nations: The Women’s Movement
and the Armenian Genocide”
This paper explores the writer Inga Nalbandian’s public witnessing of the
Armenian Genocide in her 1917 book, Den Store Jammer [The Great Misery].
Nalbandian’s status as a Danish-born woman living in Constantinople, her
marriage to an Armenian and her mothering of Armenian children, and later
her ability to be a public witness and to cooperate with European
feminists such as Henni Forchhammer, the Danish Delegate to the League of
Nations, in promoting assistance to the refugees of the Armenian Genocide
raises numerous questions which will be addressed in this paper about the
nature of identity and witnessing, as well as the intersection of
ethnicity, citizenship and gender
and the relations between European feminists and Armenian refugees.
Victoria Rowe is the author of A History of Armenian Women’s Writing:
1880-1922.
4.George Mouradian (Independent Scholar/ Retired Engineer & American Univ. of
Armenia)
“What Are the Perpetrators Afraid of?”
“What Are the Perpetrators Afraid Of?” is a paper that revisits past
holocausts and genocides and elaborates on the outcomes of these tragic
events. The paper searches into the methods used, the results, and the
after effects of the horrors. What happened to the perpetrators, what are
the ancestors of the perpetrators responsible for, and what are they
afraid of is covered in detail. Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide
has to be a festering wound that can only cure itself by the nation’s
acknowledgement of its wrongdoing. What is Turkey afraid of? Its desire to
join the European Union and the pressures on it from civilized countries
are forcing Turkey to face up to the truth. How will the past and present
scenarios affect Turkey and other nations on what happens in the near
future?
5.Anna Elisabeth Rosmus (Independent scholar)
“Family Matters: Rape and Incest in the SA and SS”
Sodomizing a child, raping a handicapped woman, and drinking beyond
capacity: Behavior unworthy of any “Aryan”, expecially an SA or SS man? It
all happened in Lower Bavaria. The men were machos, their pants quickly
unzipped, their IQs low and their past included criminal deliquencies.
Their careers were not going anywhere. Wearing a uniform gave them status,
and power. They all trusted their secrets would
remain safe. After all, the victims were family! Who would believe them?
Personal files reveal the once unthinkable: the scum inside Hitler’s
“elite”!
6. Lisa Price (Independent Researcher)”Rape as Genocide: Findings From Rwanda”
In 1998 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted Jean-Paul
Akayesu of complicity in genocide, based in part on testimonies that he
encouraged and condoned the rape of Tutsi women by Hutu police officers
and militiamen. This precedent-setting characterization of rape as a
constituent act of genocide recognized both the intersect “ional harms
done to women in the context of ethnic conflict and the harm done to
communities through the medium of anti-woman violence. This paper will
trace the conceptual steps by which this understanding was arrived at;
will analyze debates within the feminist community around the value or
danger of differentiating genocidal rape from other forms of sexual
violence in armed conflict; and will offer some suggestions as to why
genocidal rape has not been included in the statute of the newly-created
permanent International Criminal Court.
7.Sima Aprahamian (Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Sociology-Anthropology,
Concordia University)
“The Genocide in Me” – Bearing Witness to Disappearing Traces
Dorota Glowacka notes in her study of Ida Fink’s literary testimony and
Holocaust art, “The witniss is burdened with an impossible task of
searching for disappearing traces” (2002: 106). Over ninety years have
passed since the 1915 genocide of the Armenian
people yet in spite the documentation, there continues an active denial on
the part of the perpetrators and their new allies. Araz Artinian in her
recent documentary “The Genocide in Me” attempts to seek the disappearing
traces in the perpetrators’ silences and the remains that attempt to bear
witness in a touristic tour that she takes in Eastern Turkey – historic
Armenia. This paper aims to examine through a feminist perspective of
self-reflexivity the meaning of “bearing witness” in the midst of the
perpetrators’ denials and an examination of Araz Artinian’s film.
8.Aditya Dewan (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia
University)
“Cultural Genocide” and the Indigenous Peoples of Highland
Bangladesh – new critical perspectives on post-war and reconciliation
phase
This paper argues that Bangladesh commits cultural genocide directly or
indirectly by suppressing the indigenous peoples’ culture in the
Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. First, it describes the key
components of traditional cultures such as language and education,
religion, dress patterns, customs and rituals, habits, morals, traditional
medicine, and so on. Secondly, the paper examines how these aspects of
cultures have been affected by the deliberate policies followed by
successive governments of Bangladesh. Finally, the paper concludes that
the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord signed in December 1997 has also
accelerated the process of disintegration of traditional cultures of the
CHT people.
9.Susanne Luhmann (Women’s Studies, Thorneloe College at Laurentian University)
“Ethical Trauma? On the Ethical Implications of Using Trauma Theory
and Holocaust-Study Frameworks to Study Legacies of Perpetration”
Can trauma be ethical? What are the ethical limits of studying
perpetration itself through the conceptual lens of trauma? My paper
considers some of the ethical dilemmas and implications that arise from
using Holocaust and trauma studies to study the after-effects of national
trauma not upon the victims and their descendents but upon those who trace
their heritage to the perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders of these
national crimes.
Central to both trauma studies and Holocaust studies have been key
concepts like transgenerational haunting (Abraham and Torok 1994), memory
effects (Apel 2002), secondary witnessing (Apel 2002). Trauma and
Holocaust studies have developed a sophisticated analysis of the
pervasiveness of the psychic structure of trauma and its contiguous
affects such as guilt, denial, shame etc. The psychic structure of
national trauma, differently from the legal and political questions, is
not limited to the victims. However, using these concepts also poses
ethical risks and dilemmas that need to be addressed when expanding the
insights of Holocaust and trauma studies to the aggressors and their
descendents.
10.-Amira Bojadzija (York)”Sense Memory in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and
After”
Body as the primary site of suffering occupies an important place in Charlotte
Delbo’s Auschwitz et Après (1961), in which physical pain, thirst, hunger and
experience of cold are rendered in a particularly vivid manner as sense memory.
Sensible is the arch-phenomenon upon which subjectivity is built. Merleau-Ponty
writes that a being capable of sense-experience could have no other mode of
knowing. I argue that Delbo’s text exposes the incompatibility of the
rationalist discourse of dignity and justice with the image of a naked, filthy
subject, embodying pain. I suggest a new reading of Auschwitz and After as a
text that questions the hierarchy of the ordering of human experience, and the
philosophical and cultural consequences that derive from it.