Lunch Lecture “Otherwise, I have a rather pretty figure” – Hungarian Jewish women in Swedish medical rehabilitation after WWII
As part of Gender Awareness Week’s lunch lecture series, Kata Bohus will give a 20-minute presentation on her research, followed by a 10-minute discussion.
After World War II, Sweden became a key player in the rehabilitation of concentration camp survivors. In the spring and summer of 1945, about 30,000 survivors arrived in the Scandinavian country, of whom about 1,500 were young Hungarian Jewish women, predominantly between the ages of 14 and 20. With a theoretical focus on the female body as a site of political inscription, epistemic negotiation, and institutional translation, I examine these women’s experiences of the female body’s healing, the signs of recovery they identified, and highlight the tensions between the contemporary medical definition of rehabilitation and these perceptions. Using contemporary ego-documents and first-hand accounts, I present four interlinked perspectives: 1.) culturally determined concepts of the healthy, ”normal” female body; 2.) socially defined relations with their human environment, transcending the individual’s body; 3.) structural institutional framing of recovery in medical performances and the medical professional's gaze and touch as a form of control over the body; 4. sensory impressions of the body itself, which are related to emotional changes and memories.