victimage

English

Etymology

victim +‎ -age

Noun

victimage (countable and uncountable, plural victimages)

1. The state of being a victim.
   • 1851 October, Caroline Chesebro, “Hearts of Oak”, in Knickerbocker, Or, New-York Monthly Magazine, volume 38, page 399:

     It was a source of murmuring discontent to her, in the first years of an intelligent girlhood, to feel how entirely they (for it was always 'they' in her thought) had been shut out from the fairer social world, the victims of she scarcely knew what, but helpless in that victimage, and utterly weak to master circumstances.

   • 1903, The Lancet, page 306:

     Constant victimage to a feeble stomach while instrumenting Tannhäuser. (1845.)

   • 2014, Herbert S Strean, Psychoanalytic Approaches With the Hostile and Violent Patient:

     Exploration of the victim's history can bring about the insight that the victimage is more than coincidence and that he has had a part in promoting it.

2. The act of scapegoating a person or group in order to avoid societal guilt.
   • 1983, William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, page 151:

     What is so terrible about victimage is that, invariably, one man's guilt, or a group's guilt, results in some other person's or persons' injury or death.

   • 1990, Richard Schechner, Willa Appel, By Means of Performance, page 215:

     Both aesthetic and social logic motivate the victimages.

   • 1994, Argumentation and Advocacy:

     Victimage and populism work in conjunction.

   • 2014, Luther H. Martin, The Mind of Mithraists, page 26:

     In Girard's view, culture generally, and especially a military culture, involves the displacement of mimetic rivalry to a hierarchical pattern of dominance, and finally to a unanimous victimage (Girard 1987: 126, 128), a mechanism of transference that empowers political propaganda (Girard 1987: 140).

   • 2016, Michael Blain, Power, Discourse and Victimage Ritual in the War on Terror:

     This book views the war on terrorism from Kenneth Burke's perspective— dramatism and the related concept of victimage ritual —and the problematic of ruling liberal societies.