Vice & Virtue As Woman?

he Psychomachia is a violent text: it vividly renders battles between vice and virtue. The audience watches the maiming and dismemberment of the vice’s body in the course of virtue’s ultimate victory over vice. The body is rarely revealed; it is hidden beneath the clothing and attributes that identify vice and virtue as either male or female, masculine or feminine. Gender is not straightforward: it is constructed in abstract ways that allow the artists to firmly identify vice and virtue as a particular gender in one scene, while shifting that identification in the next in order to imbue the narrative with greater meaning for the manuscripts’ audiences. In creating a game of shifting genders, the Anglo-Saxon artists encourage viewers to try to identify the figures as a particular gender, and, in the moment of surety, the artists change details to destabilize gender representation. Male transforms into female. Feminine becomes masculine. Ultimately the audience is left questioning what is male and what is female and whether such categories are appropriate in understanding these illustrations. In describing the ways in which transgendered bodies are formulated in contemporary society, Susan Stryker has noted that “their multiple and contradictory statuses of visibility and erasure, of presence and absence, are intimately related to the operations of social power that create norms, impart consequence to difference, and construct the space of a dominant culture.” 1 Stryker’s comments, and transgender theory more