What does it mean to be both victim and perpetrator? And what happens when victimhood becomes not just a condition, but an identity — one that can be inhabited, performed, and turned against others?

These are the questions at the heart of this project, which takes the biblical figure of Sarah as its point of departure. Sarah is one of the most complex women in the Hebrew Bible: handed over by her husband Abraham to foreign rulers, denied agency over her own body, and rendered vulnerable by her inability to bear a child. Yet she is also the woman who drives Hagar and her son Ishmael into the desert, transforming her own experience of oppression into an act of domination. In Sarah, victimhood and violence are not opposites — they are entangled.

This project traces how that entanglement has been received, reimagined, and redeployed across centuries of Western culture. Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theory — particularly the work of Julia Kristeva — it develops the concept of double victimhood: the condition in which long-term oppression does not simply produce suffering, but reshapes identity in ways that perpetuate cycles of violence. The biblical Sarah becomes a lens through which to examine how gendered victimhood functions as a cultural and political category, not merely a personal experience.

The project pursues this question across two interconnected terrains. In the biblical texts, it attends closely to Sarah's narrative alongside related figures — Hagar, the unnamed women of sacrificial stories — recovering the complexity that centuries of interpretation have often smoothed over. In contemporary literary reception, it turns to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, where Sarah's double logic resurfaces with striking clarity in figures such as Aunt Lydia and Handmaid Jeanine: women who have survived oppression by learning to enforce it. The juxtaposition is not merely illustrative — it reveals how ancient narrative structures continue to shape modern imaginations of gender, power, and self-sacrifice.

At a moment when victimhood identity is increasingly mobilized in political life — deployed to justify exclusion, to consolidate authority, and to police the boundaries of belonging — understanding its deeper genealogies is both a scholarly and a civic imperative. This project contributes to that understanding by bringing the resources of biblical exegesis, feminist hermeneutics, and literary analysis to bear on one of Western culture's most enduring and most contested figures.

This project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), grant no. 10.55776/V1047.