Making Sense of a Rape Photograph: Sexual Violence as Social Performance on the Eastern Front, 1939–1944
Résumé
"This article begins with a disturbing image that has a no-less-unsettling provenance. It shows a group of fifteen young German soldiers standing in a semicircle, carousing and laughing as one of their comrades emultes a sex act with an unidentified woman who may or may not be dead. The laughter of his comrades suggests approval for the actons of the man on the ground. Although it is not clear if the photograph depicts an act of actual rape, its aftermath, or mere mimicry, what is certain is that the depicted scene ascribes the woman only one fonction: she is an object of amusement that mediates coercion and asymmetric power relations..."