ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the lack of critical attention paid to this particular kind of trauma narrative is linked to the fraught history of gender as a category of analysis in Holocaust and trauma studies. The subject of gender has a complex and contentious history in the fields of Holocaust and trauma studies. Trauma studies highlight the essential role that the construction of narratives plays for unearthing and defusing traumatic memory in the aftermath of disasters. A guiding theoretical and conceptual thread for scholars of gender has been to insist on the particular and the everyday in order to challenge the universalized approaches to trauma and the overgeneralizations about the experience of historically traumatic events that otherwise dominate the field. Feminist scholarship on trauma and sexual assault offers further development of gender’s use as a mode of theoretical and methodological inquiry.
