Abstract
Jocelyn Boryczka uses a conceptual history approach to examine how virtue and vice have been used as a discursive political tool and how this tool has created a class of suspect citizens. By identifying the gendered dynamics of virtue and vice, the author exposes the paradox of American women’s role in politics—that they are responsible for the moral upbringing of society while being an ever-present threat to political order and stability. This paradox places women in a precarious position, in which women become vulnerable targets of backlash politics, impeding the possibility of their full citizenship.
In each chapter of Suspect Citizens, the author highlights ancient, modern, and contemporary examples of how virtue and vice have been used to construct women as suspect citizens. Chapter One focuses on the moral (private sphere) and civic (public sphere) dimensions of virtue and vice. Chapter Two explores how virtue and vice conceptually emerged from American Puritanism. Chapter Three explores how virtue and vice play out in backlash politics regarding contemporary debates over expanding women’s education and their access to it as well as abstinence-only sex education. Chapter Four brings together debates between nineteenth-century loyalist and rebellious Lowell mill girls and twentieth-century anti- and pro-sadomasochism lesbian feminists in order to demonstrate that the virtue and vice script is so deeply embedded that it is even used within marginalized political groups. Chapter Five explores how moral assumptions lead to different public and private expectations for men and women and how this affects democratic politics, and Chapter Six explores whether care should be defined as a virtue. The book concludes by considering how to move beyond virtue and vice in order to promote a democratic feminist ethics based on freedom, equality, and inclusion.
Throughout her analysis the author succeeds in identifying the emergence of the virtue and vice concept, its relation to other theoretical concepts and political arguments, and how the concept is used by political actors to achieve their political goals. This book is necessary reading for anyone interested in political and feminist theories.