Rassenschande, genocide and the reproductive Jewish body: examining the use of rape and sexualized violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust

Rape and sexual violence against Jewish women is a relatively unexplored area of investigation. This article adds to the scant literature on this topic. It asks: how and why did women's reproductive bodies (gender), combined with their status as Jews (race), make them particularly vulnerable during the Holocaust? The law against Rassenschande (racial defilement) prohibited sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. Yet, Jewish women were raped by German men. Providing a more nuanced account than is provided by the dehumanization thesis, this article argues that women were targeted precisely because of their Jewishness and their reproductive capabilities. In addition, this piece proposes that the genocidal attack on women's bodies in the form of rape (subsequently leading to the murder of impregnated women) and sexualized violence (forced abortions and forced sterilizations) must be interpreted as an attack on an essentialized group: woman-as-Jew

“Our stories could kill you”: Storytelling, healthcare, and the legacy of the “talking cure” in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998) and Georgia Kaʻapuni McMillen’s School for Hawaiian Girls (2005)

The notion of indigenous intergenerational historical trauma, developed by Native American engagements with trauma studies, has influenced bicultural or multicultural healthcare systems in New Zealand and Hawaiʻi. Beliefs that indigenous storytelling facilitates healing underpin these discourses, a premise shared by postcolonial trauma scholarship addressing Pacific literatures. This article questions underlying – and romanticized – arguments that Māori and Hawaiian storytelling heals. It analyses how storytelling is re-envisioned as a potential rather than realized space of healing in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes and Georgia Kaʻapuni McMillen’s School for Hawaiian Girls. It contends that the legacy of the “talking cure” obscures issues of responsible telling and listening, intergenerational respect, and silence in Māori and Hawaiian iterations of health and well-being. By reframing storytelling as a precarious, even dangerous, route to well-being, these readings demonstrate how Pacific literatures might contribute to culturally nuanced appraisals of oral rites and their relationship to colonial trauma