Gendered viewing strategies: a critique of Holocaust-related films that eroticize, monsterize and fetishize the female body

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis piece unpacks how Holocaust-related films – ranging from Nazisploitation cinema (Love Camp 7, 1968; Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, 1975) through to ‘art house’ (The Night Porter, 1974) and mainstream representations (Schindler’s List, 1994) – eroticize Nazi atrocities and violence against women. Following on from Caldwell’s analysis of gender ‘realness’ we argue that there has been a tendency for such films to present masculinity as the dominant power-simulacra. Using Schweickart’s (1986) androcentric reading strategy and Mulvey’s (1992) scopophilic male gaze, we ask whether gender hierarchies and inequalities are reproduced in these cinematic representations.