Dictionary

victimage en · NOUN

Etymology

From victim + -age.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) The state of being a victim.
   • Constant victimage to a feeble stomach while instrumenting Tannhäuser. (1845.) 1903, The Lancet, page 306:
   • 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. 1851 October, Caroline Chesebro, “Hearts of Oak”, in Knickerbocker, Or, New-York Monthly Magazine, volume 38, page 399:
   • 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. 2014, Herbert S Strean, Psychoanalytic Approaches With the Hostile and Violent Patient:
2. (countable, uncountable) The act of scapegoating a person or group in order to avoid societal guilt.
   • 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). 2014, Luther H. Martin, The Mind of Mithraists, page 26:
   • 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. 1983, William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, page 151:
   • Both aesthetic and social logic motivate the victimages. 1990, Richard Schechner, Willa Appel, By Means of Performance, page 215:
   • 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. 2016, Michael Blain, Power, Discourse and Victimage Ritual in the War on Terror:
   • Victimage and populism work in conjunction. 1994, Argumentation and Advocacy:

Forms