Dr. Dorota Glowacka

King’s Professor Dorota Glowacka will be delivering a public lecture (Re) framing Gender: Representations of Women’s Bodies in Holocaust Photographs at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is a Visiting Scholar.

Lecture Abstract:

“Depictions of women in Holocaust photographs were shaped by traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality. Whether in perpetrator photography, clandestine photographs from ghettos, or liberation photographs from camps, this visual repertoire has featured female bodies that conform to normative conceptions of gender. Gendered conventions have influenced the way images of women have been appropriated in practices of memorialization, as well as in Holocaust scholarship and pedagogy. In this lecture, Professor Glowacka analyzes several photographs and discusses the ways cultural codes, gendered frameworks of meaning and aesthetic conceptions of female beauty contribute to which images circulate in postmemorial landscapes and which ones have been excluded from practices of memorialization. She reflects on whether these accustomed ways of seeing, shaped by gendered power relations, can be interrupted.”

The lecture will begin at noon PDT – 4 p.m. ADT. This is a free public lecture that people may attend either in person or virtually. Please RSVP if you would like to see the lecture via Zoom.

Banner photo: Portion of a photo of survivors in Bergen-Belsen peeling potatoes while behind them lie the corpses of prisoners who died before the liberation of the camp. The original caption reads: “Women peeling potatoes in front of piles of dead bodies.” [Photo courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft]