Susan Rubin Suleiman is a 2005 - 2006 Radcliffe Fellow and the C.
Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
at Harvard University.
Suleiman begins by suggesting that the majority of the work of
remembering wars is assigned to men: from epic poetry to war novels and movies, men are the
primary creators of these memorial narratives. Women's specific experiences in war are often
written out of history, just as their activities as reporters are written out of history.
"This could be simply a consequence of the fact that men have been traditionally the makers
of war, and many modern writers who have written about war - from Hemingway to Mailer, or
Erich Maria Remarque, James Jones, Joseph Heller, among others - had firsthand experience of
what they wrote about."
Suleiman talks about gender coded responses to death and violence and
suggests that it is more complicated than we might think. She points out, as one example,
the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which on the surface seems coded "feminine" because sewing and
quilting are traditionally women's work. But at the same time, the foundation that supports
the Memorial Quilt has as many men as women on it. How do the concepts of masculine and
feminine work in this context? Nevertheless, Suleiman believes that there are significant
gender differences, gender implications, and gender biases in the institutionalization of
memory. She describes how established Holocaust specialists have reacted negatively to
attempts to emphasize gender difference in the Holocaust and appeared unaware of or perhaps
unconcerned with the deeply patriarchal position from which they spoke.
She closes her discussion by describing a nonfiction work that
continues to complicate, or perhaps just asks us to not be distracted by, the role of gender
in remembering and mourning. In Dora Bruder, Suleiman says, author Patrick Modiano attempts
to recreate the life of a young French Jewish girl who was deported from Paris in September
1942 and murdered in Auschwitz. According to Suleiman, the work "is not only a conscious act
of remembrance, bringing a forgotten and anonymous victim into memory, it is also a moving
meditation on the ethical responsibility of the living toward those who died untimely,
unnatural, and unmourned deaths. The fact that Modiano is a man and that Dora Bruder is a
woman - becomes truly secondary."
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