ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the roles and positions of women in the gulag as political prisoners, partisans, prison guards, and government officials. An interpretive analysis of memoirs, interviews, biographical accounts, and oral histories indicates a distinctively gendered experience of repression characterized by bodily depravations and specific sex-based repression, including verbal and physical assaults, sexual harassment and voyeurism, attacks on maternity, and forced fertility control. Despite or because of such humiliations and abuses, women of different social classes and religious and political affiliations manifested higher levels of solidarity than their male counterparts. Similarly, with some few notable exceptions, women prison officials are here represented as for the most part compassionate though in some cases brutally unsympathetic. In fact, both public and private representations of women were and are significantly influenced by traditional conceptions of gender roles. These images incorporated in movies, public exhibitions, museums, and other forms of memorialization present a dichotomy between the “good woman” (the faithful and sacrificial wife, mother, or sister) and the “bad woman” (oversexualized, greedy, or asexual and treacherous). These gendered aspects of memory analysis reflect how power relationships and social norms shape both women’s self-representations and their public representations by others.
