Trauma-Selfie: Active victimhood in war

Abstract

This article conceptualizes the “Trauma-Selfie” as a distinctive form of embodied digital witnessing in mediatized war: the real‑time self‑documentation of extreme violence by victims using mobile phones. Drawing on approximately 300 victim‑generated videos from the 7 October 2023 attack on the Nova music festival, it develops a motivational and aesthetic typology to show how filming under fire in contemporary warfare moves between the excitement of spectacle, black humor, frantic escape footage, quasi‑journalistic performances, intimate last wills and frozen hiding – while relying on familiar media templates. Rather than treating these recordings as either symptoms of technological numbness or straightforward ethical acts of testimony, the analysis shows how they operate at the threshold between bodily documentation and testimony, through what we call hybrid recipienthood: a simultaneous orientation toward intimate others, imagined publics and the self as an internal witness. Adopting a critical perspective on the politics of trauma, the article introduces “active victimhood” to theorize how Trauma‑Selfies displace professional news images, and provide powerful visual legitimacy for Israeli narratives of suffering and retaliation in contemporary conflict.