After leaving our first class, I started rethinking the scope of my project. My original plan was to focus on this idea of reward and punishment but the more I work on it, the more I struggle to understand my own direction and topic. The issue I have now is that my topic is so obscure and under-published that I feel like I have to educated my readers first on what forced prostitution was. By the time I finish doing that, I struggle to find a way to bridge the history and my interpretation of the reward system. Also, writing about the reward-aspect of my research focuses more on the men who visited the brothel and not necessarily the women who were forced into prostitution. I want to make sure that they don't lose their humanity in the course of this project.
Right now I'm thinking about my research in this way:
- All prisoners were stripped of their identity and gender-characteristics like personal clothing, hair, perfume, etc. Starvation deprived them of their outward sexual appearance (the breasts and butt began to shrink). At the end of this "desexualization" process, there was relatively no difference between male and female prisoners.
- When stripped of one's sexual identity, being reminded of one's former self becomes valuable. It restores one's sense of identity and humanity, which encourages survival.
- So, the Nazis made longer hair, personal clothing, and better food (so returned body mass and visible sexual organs), and sex, a reward.
- The reward was reserved for the higher-ranking prisoners which enforced a camp hierarchy headed by those who looked relatively healthier and had access to camp luxuries (things that went beyond survival). These higher-ranking prisoners then had an incentive for visiting the brothel because it reenforced their positions at the top of the prisoner hierarchy and supported their survival.
- Sex became synonymous with reward even if the male prisoners did not want to have sex. The access itself was valuable. This became normalized.
- The women who were forced into prostitution often came from backgrounds that made them more vulnerable to being chosen for this work. Many were former prostitutes or came from horrible living conditions in Ravensbrück where the promise of more food and better housing seemed like their only chance of survival. Being forced into this role was itself a form of punishment as sex was extracted from their bodies routinely and efficiently without concern for the women's experiences or consent.
- Both men and women were subjected to invasive medical examinations and procedures during the process of visiting the brothel. This process of further dehumanization was normalized-- which could be why it became so shameful after liberation.
- The SS were involved in every step along the way and exacted control over who visited the brothel, who worked at the brothel, for how long, in what position sex occurred, etc. This kept them in the ultimate position of power.