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{{Short description|American feminist academic and critic (born 1947)}} | |||
a Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems'' (2005) ISBN 0375420843 | |||
{{Use mdy dates|date=August 2020}} | |||
{{Infobox writer | |||
==External links== | |||
| birth_name = Camille Anna Paglia | |||
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| name = Camille Paglia | |||
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| image = Camille Paglia.jpg | |||
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| caption = Paglia in 2017 | |||
| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1947|4|2|mf=y}} | |||
| birth_place = ], U.S. | |||
| occupation = Professor, cultural critic | |||
| education = ] (])<br>] (], ]) | |||
| subjects = Popular culture, art, poetry, sex, film, feminism, politics | |||
| movement = ] | |||
}} | |||
'''Camille Anna Paglia''' ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|p|ɑː|l|i|ə}}; born April 2, 1947) is an American academic, social critic and ]. Paglia was a professor at the ] in ], Pennsylvania from 1984 until the university's closure in 2024.<ref>{{cite web|url= https://www.uarts.edu/staff-directory/cpaglia|title= Camille Paglia|website= Staff|publisher= U arts|access-date= May 7, 2019|archive-date= October 17, 2019|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20191017181332/https://www.uarts.edu/staff-directory/cpaglia|url-status= dead}}</ref> She is critical of many aspects of modern culture<ref name="TMN-2005-08-03">{{Cite news |newspaper=The Morning News |title=Birnbaum v. Camille Paglia |date=August 3, 2005 | |||
| first=Robert |last=Birnbaum |url= http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum_v/camille_paglia.php | format = interview}}</ref><ref name= "cbc-2009-05-23">{{Cite news |title = An atheist's defence of religion: The paradox of Camille Paglia, the cultural gunslinger|first = Richard|last = Handler|date = May 23, 2009 | work = CBC News|url = http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/an-atheist-s-defence-of-religion-1.835709}}</ref> and is the author of '']'' (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary ] and of ], as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of ] such as its ], ], and ]. | |||
== Personal life == | |||
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Paglia was born in ], the eldest child<ref name=":0">{{Cite news|url= https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/camille-paglia-i-dont-get-along-with-lesbians-at-all-they-dont-like-me-and-i-dont-like-them-8076611.html |title=Camille Paglia – 'I don't get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them'|last= Patterson |first=Christina|date=August 25, 2012|work=The Independent |access-date=May 30, 2017|language= en-GB}}</ref> of Pasquale and Lydia Anne (née Colapietro) Paglia. All four of her grandparents were born in ]. Her mother emigrated to the United States at five years old from ], in the ], ], Italy.<ref name= "TMN-2005-08-03" /><ref>{{Citation | url = https://youtube.com/pg0hPidLPCk?t=41m37s | title = You tube | publisher = Google}}{{Dead link|date=November 2018 |bot= InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes}}</ref> Paglia has stated that her father's side of the family was from the ]n towns of ], ], and ].{{Sfn | Paglia | 1994 | p = 61}} Paglia was raised ],<ref>{{cite news |work= ]|url= https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511|url-status=live|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20191230102135/https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511 |archive-date=December 30, 2019|title= A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire|last= Varadaraja |first= Tunku|date=August 30, 2019}}</ref> and attended primary school in rural ], where her family lived in a working ].<ref>{{Citation | title = Arcadia | newspaper = ] | date = March 15, 1997 | page = 22}}</ref> Her father, a ] of ],<ref>{{Citation | title = Pasquale J. Paglia | type = obit | newspaper = Syracuse Herald Tribune | date = January 23, 1991}}</ref> taught at the Oxford Academy high school and exposed his young daughter to art through books he brought home about French art history. In 1957, her family moved to ], New York, so that her father could begin ]; he eventually became a professor of ] at ].<ref name="time-1992-01-13">{{Cite news |newspaper=Time |title=The Bête Noire of Feminism: Camille Paglia |first=Martha |last=Duffy |date=January 13, 1992 |url= http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974660-1,00.html |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20121106034740/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974660-1,00.html |url-status= dead|archive-date= November 6, 2012}}</ref> She attended the Edward Smith Elementary School, T. Aaron Levy Junior High, and ].<ref name="Scotsman">{{Cite journal | last = Paglia| first = Camille | title =My Education | journal = The Scotsman | date = January 26, 2000}}</ref> In 1992, Carmelia Metosh, her ] teacher for three years, said, "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made (in class), she had to challenge them. She made good points then, as she does now."<ref name="ReferenceA">{{cite news |title= Hurricane Camille |first= James 'Jim' | last = McKeever | newspaper = Syracuse Herald American |location= Syracuse, NY |date= November 22, 1992}}</ref> Paglia thanked Metosh in the acknowledgments to ''Sexual Personae'', later describing her as "the ] of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and ]s".<ref name = "Scotsman" /> | |||
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During her stays at a summer ]<ref>{{cite web |title=A Short History of the Beaverkill Valley |url= http://beaverkillfriends.org/Pages/StoryV2History.html |website=Friends of Beaverkill Community |access-date=March 31, 2019}}</ref> camp in ], she took on a variety of new names, including Anastasia (her ] name, inspired by the film '']''), Stacy, and Stanley.{{Sfn | Paglia | 1994 | p = 428–29}} A crucially significant event for her was when an ] exploded after she poured too much ] into the latrine. "That symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and ]... and I would drop the bomb into it".<ref>{{Cite news|url= https://www.chicagotribune.com/1994/12/08/camille-paglia/ |title=Camille Paglia! |last=Lavin |first=Cheryl |newspaper= Chicago Tribune | date = December 8, 1994 |access-date=January 18, 2017}}</ref><ref name = "nyt-1994-11-20">{{Cite news |url= https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/books/advertisements-for-themselves.html |title=Advertisements for Themselves |first=Wendy |last=Steiner |newspaper=The New York Times |date = November 20, 1994}}</ref> | |||
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For more than a decade, Paglia was the partner of artist Alison Maddex.<ref>{{cite news |title= In a New Museum, a Blue Period |first=William L |last=Hamilton |date=March 11, 1999 |newspaper=The New York Times |url= https://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40A11F8345B0C728DDDAA0894D1494D81 |archive-url= https://archive.today/20130130144017/http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40A11F8345B0C728DDDAA0894D1494D81 |url-status=dead |archive-date=January 30, 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |title= Camille Paglia: Warrior for the word |last= Lauerman |first= Kerry |date=April 7, 2005 |newspaper=Salon |url= http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/04/07/paglia |access-date= October 9, 2010 |archive-date=January 23, 2011 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20110123234737/http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/04/07/paglia |url-status=dead}}</ref> Paglia legally adopted Maddex's son (who was born in 2002).<ref name= "gm-2007-10-18">{{Cite news |title= Camille Paglia: Hillary Clinton can't win – and shouldn't |newspaper= The Globe & Mail |first= Margaret |last= Wente |date=October 18, 2007 |url= https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/camille-paglia-hillary-clinton-cant-win---and-shouldnt/article1082452/ | |||
| location= Toronto}}</ref> In 2007, the couple separated<ref>{{cite web |url= http://www.towleroad.com/2009/06/camille-paglia-gay-activists-childish-for-demanding-rights.html |title= Camille Paglia: Gay Activists 'Childish' for Demanding Rights |publisher= Towleroad |date= June 25, 2009 |access-date= June 28, 2012 |archive-date= April 1, 2015 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20150401072717/http://www.towleroad.com/2009/06/camille-paglia-gay-activists-childish-for-demanding-rights.html |url-status= dead }}</ref> but remained "harmonious co-parents", in the words of Paglia, who lived {{convert|2|mi|km|0|abbr=off|sp=us|spell=on}} apart.<ref name=":0" /> | |||
Paglia is an ], and has stated she has "a very spiritual ] view of the universe".<ref name=PagliaMystic1>{{cite web|url=https://www.spl.org/Seattle-Public-Library/documents/transcriptions/2017/17-03-20_Camille-Paglia.pdf|title=Camille Paglia discusses 'Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism|publisher=]|accessdate=June 12, 2022}}</ref> She has expressed interest in ] and has written about it in several of her works, including ''Sexual Personae'': "I'm an astrologer – people don't mention this! I mean, everyone's attacked me for everything else. I mean, I'm an astrologer – it's right in my book. I endorse astrology. I believe in astrology. Will someone attack me for that? No!"<ref>{{cite web|title=Camille Paglia, astrologer|url=https://www.quut.com/cpc/pag-astr.html|work=Questionable Utility Company|accessdate=March 7, 2024}}</ref> | |||
== Education == | |||
Paglia entered Harpur College at ] in 1964.<ref name=Showalter>{{Citation | last = Showalter | first = Elaine | title = Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage | place = London | publisher = Picador | year = 2002}}</ref> The same year, Paglia's poem "Atrophy" was published in the local newspaper.<ref>{{Cite news | title = ''Atrophy'' |newspaper=The Post-Standard |location=Syracuse, New York |date=April 12, 1964}}</ref> She later said that she was trained to read literature by poet ], who "believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature ... And oh did I believe in that".<ref name="Nester"/> She graduated from Harpur as class ] in 1968.<ref name="time-1992-01-13" /> | |||
According to Paglia, while in college she punched a "marauding drunk",<ref name="nyt-1994-11-20"/> and takes pride in having been put on ] for committing 39 pranks.<ref name="Scotsman" /> | |||
Paglia attended ] as a ], and she claims to have been the only open lesbian at ] from 1968 to 1972.<ref name="nyt-1994-11-20"/><ref>{{Cite news |first=Dan|last=Savage | title = Interview |newspaper=The Stranger |date = October 4, 1992}}</ref> At Yale, Paglia quarreled with ], whom she later characterized as "then darkly ]," and argued with the ], Women's Liberation Rock Band when they dismissed ] as ].<ref name="Editor 1998">"Letter to the Editor", Camille Paglia, "Chronicle of Higher Education", June 17, 1998.</ref> Paglia was mentored by ].<ref name=Showalter /> ''Sexual Personae'' was then titled "The Androgynous Dream: the image of the androgyne as it appears in literature and is embodied in the ] of the artist, with reference to the visual arts and the cinema."<ref name="ReferenceB">{{Citation | type = letter | first = Camille A | last = Paglia | title = To Professor Carolyn Heilbrun | date = February 13, 1972 | publisher = Knopf Archive, Humanities Research Center | place = Austin, Texas}}</ref> | |||
In 1973, Paglia drove to an appearance by ] at Dartmouth, hoping to arrange for her to speak at Bennington, but found it difficult to find the money for Sontag's speaking fee. Paglia staged a poster campaign urging students to attend Sontag's appearance. Sontag arrived at Bennington Carriage Barn, where she was to speak, more than an hour late, and then began reading what Paglia recalled as a "boring and bleak" short story about "nothing" in the style of a ].<ref name=RollysonandPaddock /> | |||
== Career == | |||
In the autumn of 1972, Paglia began teaching at ], which hired her in part thanks to a recommendation from ].<ref name="Findlay">{{Citation | newspaper = ] | first = Heather | last = Findlay | title = Interview |date=September 2000}}</ref> At Bennington, she befriended the philosopher James Fessenden, who first taught there in the same semester.{{Sfn|Paglia|1994|p=202}} | |||
Through her study of the ] and the scholarly work of ], ], ] and others, Paglia developed a theory of sexual history that contradicted a number of ideas fashionable at the time, hence her criticism of ], ], ] and others. She laid out her ideas on ], ], homosexuality, ] and other topics in her Yale PhD thesis ''Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art,'' which she defended in December 1974. In September 1976, she gave a public lecture drawing on that dissertation,<ref>{{Citation | newspaper = Bennington Banner | title = Lecture by Camille Paglia | date = September 20, 1976}}</ref> in which she discussed ]'s '']'', followed by remarks on ], ], ], and ].<ref>{{Citation | title = Interview |date=November 2002}}</ref> | |||
Paglia wrote that she "nearly came to blows with the founding members of the ] program at the ], when they categorically denied that ]s influence human experience or behavior".<ref>{{Citation | title = Letter to the Editor | first = Camille | last = Paglia | newspaper = ] | date = June 17, 1998}}</ref> Similar fights with feminists and academics culminated in a 1978 incident{{explain|date=February 2021}} which led her to resign from Bennington; after a lengthy standoff with the administration, Paglia accepted a ] from the college and resigned in 1979.<ref name="Findlay" /> | |||
Paglia finished ''Sexual Personae'' in the early 1980s, but could not get it published. She supported herself with visiting and part-time teaching jobs at Yale, ], and other Connecticut colleges. Her paper, "The ] Androgyne and the Faerie Queene", was published in ''English Literary Renaissance'', Winter 1979, and her dissertation was cited by ] in his April 1980 article "] and the Ellipses of Interpretation", in ''Journal of Religion in Literature'', but her academic career was otherwise stalled. In a 1995 letter to Boyd Holmes, she recalled: "I earned a little extra money by doing some local features reporting for a ] alternative newspaper ('']'') in the early 1980s". She wrote articles on New Haven's historic ]s and on an old house that was a stop on the ].<ref>{{Citation | first = Camille | last = Paglia | title = To Boyd Holmes (letter) |date=February 1995}}</ref> | |||
In 1984, she joined the faculty of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which merged in 1987 with the Philadelphia College of Art to become the ]. | |||
Paglia is on the editorial board of the classics and ] journal '']''.<ref>{{cite web |url= http://www.bu.edu/arion/about-arion/ |title= About Arion |publisher= Boston University |access-date= June 28, 2012 |url-status= dead |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20120708062804/http://www.bu.edu/arion/about-arion/ |archive-date= July 8, 2012 }}</ref> She wrote a regular column for Salon.com from 1995 to 2001, and again from 2007 to 2009. Paglia resumed writing a Salon.com column in 2016.<ref>{{Cite news |url= http://www.salon.com/2016/02/11/sexism_has_nothing_to_do_with_it_camille_paglia_on_hillary_clinton_gloria_steinem_and_why_new_hampshire_women_broke_for_bernie_sanders/ |title="Sexism has nothing to do with it": Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem – and why New Hampshire women broke for Bernie Sanders |last=Paglia |first=Camille |newspaper=] |date=February 12, 2016}}</ref> | |||
Paglia cooperated with Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock in their writing of ''Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon''. Rollyson and Paddock note that Sontag "had her lawyer put our publisher on notice" when she realized she was to be the subject.<ref name=RollysonandPaddock>{{Citation | last1 = Rollyson | first1 = Carl | last2 = Paddock | first2 = Lisa | title = Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon | place = New York | publisher = WW Norton & Co | year = 2000}}</ref> | |||
Paglia participates in the decennial poll of film professionals conducted by '']'' which asks participants to submit a list of what they believe to be the ten ]. According to her responses to the poll in 2002, 2012, and 2022, the films Paglia holds in highest regard include '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', '']'', and '']''.<ref>{{Citation | url = http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/polls/topten/poll/voter.php?forename=Camille&surname=Paglia | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120625143718/http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/polls/topten/poll/voter.php?forename=Camille&surname=Paglia | url-status = dead | archive-date = June 25, 2012 | title = How the directors and critics voted: Camille Paglia | year = 2002 | work = ] via BFI | place = UK}}</ref><ref>{{Citation | url = http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/747 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120819021249/http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/747 | url-status = dead | archive-date = August 19, 2012 | title = Camille Paglia | year = 2012 | work = ] via BFI | place = UK}}</ref><ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time/all-voters/camille-paglia | title=Camille Paglia | BFI }}</ref> | |||
In 2005, Paglia was named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals by the journals '']'' and '']''.<ref name="gm-2007-10-18"/> In 2012, an article in '']'' remarked that {{nowrap|"nyone}} who has been following the body count of the culture wars over the past decades knows Paglia".<ref name=on-art/> Paglia has said that she is willing to have her entire career judged on the basis of her composition of what she considers to be "probably the most important sentence that she has ever written": "God is man's greatest idea."<ref>{{cite web|title=Camille Paglia| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120524081033/http://bigideas.tvo.org/episode/128098/camille-paglia | archive-date = May 24, 2012 |url=http://bigideas.tvo.org/episode/128098/camille-paglia|work=Big Ideas|publisher=]|date=November 7, 2009}}</ref> | |||
== Views == | |||
=== Feminism === | |||
Though Paglia admires ] and '']'' ("the supreme work of modern feminism... its deep learning and massive argument are unsurpassed") as well as ],<ref name = Showalter /> '']'' critic Martha Duffy writes that Paglia "does not hesitate to hurl brazen insults" at several feminists. In an interview, Paglia stated that to be effective, one has to "name names"; criticism should be concrete. Paglia stated that many critics "escape into abstractions", rendering their criticism "intellectualized and tame".<ref name= "Rodden2001">{{cite book|first=John|last= Rodden|title= Performing the Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=WzMemaK2RMEC&pg=PA167 |year= 2001|publisher=]|location= Lincoln|isbn=0-8032-3939-4|page=174}}</ref> Paglia was known as one of the scholars and feminists that ] American singer ] within feminism and for which publications such as '']'' called her the "high priestess of ]".<ref name="Madonna">{{cite magazine|title=Madonna|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zUE-AQAAIAAJ|year=1998|magazine=Vogue|page=135|url-access=limited}}</ref> | |||
Paglia accused Greer of becoming "a drone in three years" as a result of her early success; Paglia has also criticized the work of feminist activist ].<ref name= "time-1992-01-13" /> ] calls Paglia "unique in the hyperbole and virulence of her hostility to virtually all the prominent feminist activists, public figures, writers and scholars of her generation", mentioning ], ], ], ], ], ], ], and ] as targets of her criticism.<ref name= Showalter /> Paglia accused ] of starting "the repressive, ] style in feminist criticism."<ref name= "Salon-1999-06-05">{{Cite news |title=Kate Millett, the ambivalent feminist |first=Leslie |last=Crawford |newspaper= Salon |date=June 5, 1999 |url= http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/06/05/millet/print.html}}</ref> Paglia has repeatedly criticized ], former president of the ] (NOW), calling her a "sanctimonious", unappealing role model for women<ref>{{cite web |first= Camille |last=Paglia|url= http://www.salon.com/april97/columnists/paglia970429.html |title= Why I Go for Women with Big Beaks |website=]|publisher=]|location=San Francisco, ] |date=April 29, 1997 |url-status=dead |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20081230063354/http://www.salon.com/april97/columnists/paglia970429.html |archive-date= December 30, 2008}}</ref> whose "smug, arrogant" attitude is accompanied by "painfully limited processes of thought".<ref>{{cite web | first = Camille | last = Paglia | url = http://208.17.81.135/col/pagl/1997/10/14frames.html | title = Men and their Discontents | website = ] | publisher = ] | location = San Francisco, CA | date = October 14, 1974 | url-status = dead | archive-url = https://archive.today/20100427052432/http://208.17.81.135/col/pagl/1997/10/14frames.html | archive-date = April 27, 2010 | access-date = January 16, 2009 }}</ref> Paglia contends that under Ireland's leadership, NOW "damaged and marginalized the women's movement".<ref>{{cite web |first=Camille|last= Paglia |url= http://archive.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/12/06/year_end/print.html |title=The Peevish Porcupine Beats the Shrill Rooster |website=] |publisher=] |location=San Francisco, CA |date= December 6, 2000 |access-date=June 28, 2012 |url-status=dead |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20090206142246/http://archive.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/12/06/year_end/print.html |archive-date=February 6, 2009 }}</ref> | |||
In 1999, ] wrote an essay called "The Professor of Parody", in which she criticized Judith Butler for retreating to abstract theory disconnected from real world problems.<ref>{{cite news|first1=Robert |last1= Boynton |title=Who Needs Philosophy?|url= https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/21/magazine/who-needs-philosophy.html |newspaper=] |location= New York City|date=November 21, 1999 |access-date= December 12, 2015}}</ref> Paglia reacted to the essay by stating that the criticism was "long overdue", but characterized the criticism as "one ] diva turning against another". She criticized Nussbaum for failing to make her criticisms earlier while accusing her of borrowing Paglia's ideas without acknowledgement. She called Nussbaum's "preparation or instinct for sex analysis... dubious at best", but nevertheless stated that "Nussbaum is a genuine scholar who operates on a vastly higher intellectual level than Butler".<ref>{{cite web|url = http://www.salon.com/it/col/pagl/1999/02/24pagl.html|title = Butler vs. Nussbaum|website = ]|publisher = ]|location = San Francisco, CA|date = February 24, 1999|access-date = July 2, 2009|archive-date = June 25, 2009|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20090625205734/http://www.salon.com/it/col/pagl/1999/02/24pagl.html|url-status = dead}}</ref> | |||
Many feminists have criticized Paglia; ] calls her "Perhaps the most conspicuous target of feminist opprobrium," noting that the ''Women's Review of Books'' described ''Sexual Personae'' as ]'s "counter-assault on feminism".<ref name=Sommers>{{Citation | last = Sommers | first = Christina Hoff | title = Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women | place = New York | publisher = Simon & Schuster | year = 1995| title-link = Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women }}</ref> Some feminist critics have characterized Paglia as an "] feminist", critical of central features of much contemporary feminism but holding out "her own special variety of feminist affirmation".<ref>{{Cite book |first= Peter |last=Loptson |title=Readings on human nature |date= 1998 |isbn=1-55111-156-X |page=490 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=6bGOKpFOY7kC&q=camille%20paglia&pg=PA490 | publisher =Broadview Press|location= Peterborough, Canada}}</ref> | |||
] traded a series of sometimes personal attacks with Paglia throughout the early 1990s. In '']'', Wolf wrote that Paglia "poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters" and characterized Paglia as intellectually dishonest.<ref>{{cite magazine | first = Naomi | last = Wolf | author-link=Naomi Wolf |title = Feminist Fatale | newspaper = The New Republic | date = March 16, 1992 | pages = 23–25}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine | first = Camille | last = Paglia | title = Wolf Pack | magazine = ] | date = April 13, 1992 | pages = 4–5 |ref= none}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine | first1 = Naomi | last1 = Wolf | first2 = Camille | last2 = Paglia | title = The Last Words | newspaper = The New Republic | date = May 18, 1992 | pages = 4–5}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|last=Viner|first= Katharine |title= Stitched up|url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/01/society2 |newspaper= The Guardian| date = August 31, 2001|location= London}}</ref> In a 1991 speech, Paglia criticized Wolf for blaming anorexia on the media, calling Wolf a "twit".<ref>{{Citation | title = Gifts of Speech | url = http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html | last = Paglia | format = lecture | date = September 19, 1991 | publisher = ] | place = Cambridge, Massachusetts}}</ref> ] said of Paglia that, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a ] saying they're not ]."<ref>{{Cite news | |||
| title= New enemies list for some of you feminists |newspaper= Reading Eagle |last=Fields |first=Suzanne |date= May 14, 1992 |url= https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=JLUxAAAAIBAJ&pg=1293%2C8699227}}</ref> Paglia called Steinem "the ] of feminism".<ref name= "tmj-1992-12-06">{{Cite news |title= Ideas flying, a maverick breaks the feminist mold |last= Blinkhorn |first= Lois |newspaper= The Milwaukee Journal |date= December 6, 1992 |url= https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=06AaAAAAIBAJ&pg=1706%2C3894467 }}{{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> ] calls Paglia one of a "seemingly endless parade of social critics have achieved celebrity by portraying not sexism but feminism as the problem". Pollitt writes that Paglia has glorified "male dominance", and has been able to get away with things "that might make even ] blanch," because she is a woman.<ref>{{cite web |last=Pollitt |first=Katha |author-link=Katha Pollitt |date=November 1997 |title=Feminism's Unfinished Business |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97nov/pollitt.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100429200713/https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97nov/pollitt.htm |archive-date=2010-04-29 |access-date=May 25, 2008 |work=The Atlantic}}</ref> | |||
Paglia's view that rape is sexually motivated has been endorsed by ] ] and ]; they comment that "Paglia... urges women to be skeptical toward the feminist 'party line' on the subject, to become better informed about risk factors, and to use the information to lower their risk of rape".<ref>{{Citation | last1 = Thornhill | first1 = Randy | last2 = Palmer | first2 = Craig T | title = A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion | place = Cambridge, Massachusetts | publisher = MIT Press | year = 2000 | page = 183}}</ref> | |||
In an essay critiquing the Hollywood/celebrity fad of "Girl Squads", made popular in 2015 by pop-icons like ], Paglia argued that rather than empowering women the cliquish practice actually harms the self-esteem of those who are not rich, famous, or attractive enough to belong to the group, while further defining women only by a very narrow, often sexualized stereotype. She challenged that to be truly empowering, these groups need to mentor, advise, and be more inclusive, for more women to realize their true, individual potential.<ref>{{cite news | last = Paglia | first = Camille | title = Camille Paglia Takes on Taylor Swift, Hollywood's #GirlSquad Culture | url = http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/camille-paglia-takes-taylor-swift-845827 | work = ] | date = October 12, 2015 }}</ref> | |||
=== Transgender people === | |||
Though she has not ], Paglia identifies as ].<ref name="WeeklyStandard">{{Cite news |last=Last |first=Jonathan V. |date=June 15, 2017 |title=Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror |work=] |location=New York City |url=http://www.weeklystandard.com/camille-paglia-on-trump-democrats-transgenderism-and-islamist-terror/article/2008464 |access-date=June 15, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201019101729/https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tag/donald-trump?source=%2Fweekly-standard%2Fcamille-paglia-on-trump-democrats-transgenderism-and-islamist-terror |archive-date=October 19, 2020}}</ref> She reports having ] since childhood, and says that "never once in my life have I felt female".<ref name=":1">{{Cite news|last=Varadarajan|first=Tunku|date=2019-08-30|title=Opinion {{!}} A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire|language=en-US|work=The Wall Street Journal|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511|access-date=2021-07-31|issn=0099-9660}}</ref> She says that she was "donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on".<ref name="WeeklyStandard" /> | |||
Nevertheless, Paglia says that she is "highly skeptical about the current ] wave" which she thinks has been produced by "far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows". She writes that "In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity."<ref name="WeeklyStandard" /> | |||
Paglia's views led to a petition demanding that the ] remove her from their faculty, but the university rejected it. Paglia considered it "a publicity stunt" and praised the university's "eloquent statement affirming ] a landmark in contemporary education."<ref>{{Cite web|title=University of the Arts rejects calls to fire Camille Paglia|url=https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/17/university-arts-rejects-calls-fire-camille-paglia|access-date=2021-08-03|website=insidehighered.com|date=April 17, 2019 |language=en}}</ref> | |||
=== Climate change === | |||
{{See also|Climate change denial}} | |||
Paglia has long rejected the scientific consensus on ], which she describes as "the political agenda that has slowly accrued" around the issue of ].<ref>{{cite web|last=Paglia|first=Camille|date=June 11, 2007|title=Real inconvenient truths|url=https://www.salon.com/2007/04/11/global_warming_14/|access-date=October 4, 2018|website=]|publisher=]|location=San Francisco, California}}</ref> In a 2017 interview with '']'', Paglia stated, "It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to ] (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender."<ref name="WeeklyStandard" /> | |||
=== French academia === | |||
Paglia is critical of the influence many postwar French writers have had on the humanities, claiming that universities are in the "thrall" of French ];<ref name="smh-2005-04-08">{{Cite news | |||
| newspaper=] | |||
| last=Baird |first=Julia | |||
| title=Hark, a libertarian looks to her right | |||
| date=April 8, 2005 | |||
| url=http://www.smh.com.au/news/Julia-Baird/Hark-a-libertarian-looks-to-her-right/2005/04/18/1113676702351.html}}</ref> that in the works of ], ], ] and ], she never once found a sentence that interested her.<ref name="salon-2007-04-11">{{Cite news | |||
| title=Real inconvenient truths | |||
| newspaper=] | |||
| first=Camille |last=Paglia | |||
| date=April 11, 2007 | |||
| url=https://www.salon.com/2007/04/11/global_warming_14/}}</ref> | |||
However, Paglia's assessment of French writers is not purely negative. She has called ]'s '']'' (1949) "brilliant and imperious" and she traces the lineage of her "dissident feminism", not from ] but from Beauvoir. Paglia also identified ]'s work as part of a high period in literature. She has praised ]'s '']'' (1957) and ]'s '']'' (1967), while finding both men's later work flawed. Of ], who influenced Paglia, she wrote " dignified yet fluid phenomenological descriptive method seemed to me ideal for art", adding that he was "the last modern French writer I took seriously".{{Sfn|Paglia|1992|p=243}}{{Sfn|Paglia|1994|p=232}}<ref>{{Citation|url=http://www.salon.com/july97/columnists/paglia2970722.html |title=Of Versace and killer prom queens |page=2 |date=July 22, 1997 |newspaper=] |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080411071450/http://www.salon.com/july97/columnists/paglia2970722.html |archive-date=April 11, 2008 }}</ref> | |||
=== Politics === | |||
Paglia characterizes herself as a ].<ref name="smh-2005-04-08"/><ref>{{cite news | last = Pagila | first = Camille | title = The Drinking Age Is Past Its Prime | url = https://time.com/72546/drinking-age-alcohol-repeal/ | magazine = ] | date = April 23, 2014 }}</ref> She opposes laws against prostitution, pornography, ], and abortion. She is also opposed to ] laws.<ref>{{cite news | last = Postrel | first = Virginia | author-link = Virginia Postrel | title = Interview with the Vamp | url = http://reason.com/archives/1995/08/01/interview-with-the-vamp | work = ] | date = August–September 1995 }}</ref><ref name="eagle-1992-12-20">{{Cite news |last=Killough |first=George | title = Paglia attacks political correctness |url= https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=DKwkAAAAIBAJ&pg=5977%2C2051846|newspaper=] |publisher= William S. Flippin | location = Reading, ] |date=December 20, 1992 }}</ref> Some of her views have been characterized as ], although when asked in 2016 if she considers herself a cultural conservative she replied: "No, not at all... Conservative would mean I was cleaving to something past which was great, and no longer is... and Usually I'm not saying we should return to anything. I do believe we're moving inexorably into the future."<ref name= "time-1992-01-13"/><ref>{{Cite web|url= https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/camille-paglia/|title = Camille Paglia on Her Lifestyle of Observation and Lamb Vindaloo | work = Conversations with Tyler | date = April 25, 2016}}</ref> | |||
Paglia criticized ] for not resigning after the ], which she says "paralyzed the government for two years, leading directly to our blindsiding by ]".<ref name="reason" /> In the ], she voted for the ] candidate ] " I detest the arrogant, corrupt ] of the ], with which I remain stubbornly registered."<ref name= "reason">{{cite magazine | title = Who's Getting Your Vote? | magazine = ] | publisher = ] | location = Washington DC | date = November 2004 | url = http://www.reason.com/news/show/29304.html | access-date = October 27, 2008 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20081029233711/http://www.reason.com/news/show/29304.html | archive-date = October 29, 2008 | url-status = dead }}</ref> | |||
In the ], Paglia supported ], and in ] she supported ].<ref>{{Cite news |first= Camille| last=Paglia | title=Why Women Shouldn't Vote for Hillary Clinton | url= https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1896080/Why-women-shouldn%27t-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton.html | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20080516215138/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1896080/Why-women-shouldn%27t-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton.html | url-status=dead | archive-date=May 16, 2008 | newspaper=] | location=London, England | date=April 20, 2008 | access-date=April 28, 2010}}</ref> In 2012, she supported ] candidate ].<ref>{{cite web |first = Kerry |last = Lauerman| title = In "Glittering" return, Paglia lets loose | url = http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/camille_paglias_glittering_images/ | website = ] | publisher= ]|location=San Francisco, CA|date = October 10, 2012}}</ref> Paglia was highly critical of 2016 presidential candidate ], calling her a "fraud" and a "liar".<ref>{{Cite magazine |first1=Nick | last1=Gillespie | first2=Todd | last2=Krainin |url= http://reason.com/archives/2015/03/19/everythings-amazing-and-camille-paglia-i/ | title=Everything's Awesome and Camille Paglia Is Unhappy! | magazine=] | publisher=]|location= Washington DC|date=March 19, 2015|access-date= May 20, 2015}}</ref> Paglia refused to support either Hillary Clinton or ] in the ], indicating in a March '']'' column that if Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party's nomination, she would either cast a write-in vote for ] or else vote for Green Party candidate Stein, as she did in 2012.<ref>{{Cite news | url= http://www.salon.com/2016/03/24/camille_paglia_this_is_why_trumps_winning_and_why_i_wont_vote_for_hillary/ | title= Camille Paglia: This is why Trump's winning, and why I won't vote for Hillary | last1=Paglia | first1=Camille | date= March 25, 2016 | work=] | access-date= May 15, 2016}}</ref> Paglia later clarified in a statement that she would vote for Stein.<ref>{{Cite news | url=http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-stars-are-voting-third-party-candidates-944954 | title=Which Hollywood Stars are Voting for Third-Party Candidates? | magazine=] | publisher=] |location=Los Angeles, CA |date=November 8, 2016 |access-date=November 11, 2016}}</ref> | |||
In 2017, she stated that she is a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and for Jill Stein in the 2016 general election.<ref name= "WeeklyStandard" /> For the ], Paglia criticized the Democratic Party for lacking a coherent message and a strong candidate. She disavowed Sanders as being "way too old and creaky" and retracted her initial support for ] for missing "a huge opportunity to play a moderating, statesmanlike role."<ref name="The Spectator">{{Cite news | url= https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/camille-paglia-hillary-wants-trump-to-win-again- | title=Camille Paglia: 'Hillary wants Trump to win again' | last1=Paglia | first1= Camille | date=December 5, 2018 | work=] | access-date=May 5, 2021}}</ref> Citing the "need to project steadiness, substance, and warmth," Paglia expressed interest in ] and ] as potential candidates.<ref name= "The Spectator"/> | |||
=== Child sexuality === | |||
In accordance with a highly politicised view of child abuse, Paglia notably commented in an interview in 1992: "In the case of ], child abuse was justified". This was her response to the singer's action on '']'', where she tore up a picture of the pope in protest of the unfolding ].<ref>{{Cite web |date=1992-11-02 |title=Transcript: Interview: Camille Paglia |url=https://www.tvo.org/transcript/008445/interview-camille-paglia |access-date=2024-01-20 |website=TVO Today}}</ref> In 1993, Paglia signed a manifesto supporting ], a ] and ] advocacy organization.<ref>{{cite news | last = Paglia | first = Camille | title = The Drinking Age Is Past Its Prime | url= http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100261734/allen-ginsberg-camille-paglia-and-the-literary-champions-of-paedophilia/ | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140306014809/http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100261734/allen-ginsberg-camille-paglia-and-the-literary-champions-of-paedophilia/ | work = ] | date = March 1, 2014 | url-status = dead | archive-date=March 6, 2014}}</ref><ref name="salonissue">{{cite magazine | title = Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled | magazine = ] | publisher = Salon Media Group | location = San Francisco, CA | date = April 15, 1997 | url = http://www.salon.com/april97/columnists/paglia970415.html | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20000510042252/http://www.salon.com/april97/columnists/paglia970415.html | access-date = September 7, 2019 | url-status = dead | archive-date = May 10, 2000 }}</ref> In 1994, Paglia supported lowering the ] to 14. She noted in a 1995 interview with pro-pedophile activist ], "I fail to see what is wrong with erotic fondling with any age."{{sfn |Paglia|1994 |pages = –91}}<ref>{{cite web|first= Camille|last=Paglia|url= http://archive.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=E6B2CF78-031D-11D4-AD990050DA7E046B|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20110711133353/http://archive.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=E6B2CF78-031D-11D4-AD990050DA7E046B |title=Has the gay movement turned down the wrong path?|website=The Guide|publisher= Bill Andriette|location= Montréal, Canada|date=August 1995|access-date= September 7, 2019 | url-status = dead | archive-date= July 11, 2011}}</ref> In a 1997 '']'' column, Paglia expressed the view that male pedophilia correlates with the heights of a civilization, stating "I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In '']'', I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization."<ref name= "salonissue"/> Paglia noted in several interviews, as well as ''Sexual Personae'', that she supported the legalization of certain forms of ].<ref name= "timeinterview">{{cite magazine | title = The Bête Noire of Feminism: Camille Paglia | magazine = ] | location = New York City | date = January 13, 1992 | url = http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974660,00.html | access-date = September 7, 2019 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web|first=Camille|last=Paglia|url= http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html|title=Crisis In The American Universities|website=Gift of Speech |publisher= ] |location= Sweet Briar, ] |date=September 19, 1991|access-date=September 7, 2019}}</ref>{{sfn|Paglia|1994 |pages = –91}} | |||
She later changed her views on the matter. In an interview for ]'s ''Saturday Morning'' show, conducted on April 28, 2018, by ], Paglia was asked, "Are you a libertarian on the issue of pedophilia?", to which she replied, "In terms of the present day, I think it's absolutely impossible to think we could reproduce the Athenian code of pedophilia, of boy-love, that was central to culture at that time. We must protect children, and I feel that very very strongly. The age of consent for sexual interactions between a boy and an older man is obviously disputed, at what point that should be. I used to think that fourteen (the way it is in some places in the world) was adequate. I no longer think that. I think young people need greater protection than that. This is one of those areas that we must confine to the realm of imagination and the history of the arts."<ref>{{cite web |last1= Paglia |first1= Camille |title=Camille Paglia – Free Women, Free Men |url= https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018642586/camille-paglia-free-women-free-men |website= Radio New Zealand |access-date=August 22, 2020 |location= Wellington, NZ | at =44 min 29 s |date=April 22, 2018}}</ref> | |||
== Books == | |||
=== ''Sexual Personae'' (1990) === | |||
{{Main|Sexual Personae}} | |||
Paglia's '']'' was rejected by at least seven different publishers before it was published by ], where it became a best-seller.<ref name="time-1992-01-13" /> 'Paglia called it her "prison book", commenting, "I felt like ], ]. It took all the resources of being ] to cut myself off and sit in my cell."<ref name=Showalter /> ''Sexual Personae'' has been called an "energetic, ]-friendly reading of ]", one that seemed "] and perverse", at the height of ]; according to Daniel Nester, its characterization of "] as the British ] or ] and ] as 'self-ruling ]s who cannot mate' still pricks up many an English major's ears".<ref name="Nester">{{cite web | first = Daniel | last = Nester | author-link = Daniel Nester | title = An interview with Camille Paglia | url = http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_04_005030.php | website = bookslut.com | publisher = ] | date = April 2005 | access-date = June 28, 2012 | archive-date = May 10, 2012 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120510061035/http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_04_005030.php | url-status = dead }}</ref> | |||
In the book, Paglia argues that ] has an inherently dangerous ] or ] aspect, especially in regard to ].<ref name="news-1990-12-09">{{Cite news |first= Karen |last= Romano |title= Camille Paglia's 'Sexual Personae' provokes amusement, outrage |newspaper= ] |publisher= ] |location= Boca Raton, Florida |date= December 9, 1990 |url= https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KNcPAAAAIBAJ&pg=5043%2C5354257 }}{{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> Culture and civilization are created by men and represent an attempt to contain that force.<ref name = "news-1990-12-09" /> Women are powerful, too, but as natural forces, and both marriage and religion are means to contain chaotic forces.<ref name="time-1992-01-13" /> A best seller, it was described by ] in a '']'' book review as being both "intellectually stimulating" and "exasperating".<ref>{{cite news |first=Terry |last=Teachout|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/books/siding-with-the-men.html|title=Siding With the Men |newspaper=The New York Times |location=New York City|date= July 22, 1990|access-date=October 4, 2018 }}</ref> ''Sexual Personae'' received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars.<ref>''See the following'': | |||
* {{Cite journal | first = Sandra M. | last = Gilbert |author-link = Sandra M. Gilbert | title = Review: Freaked Out: Camille Paglia's ''Sexual Personae'' | journal = ] | publisher = ]| location=Gambier, Ohio| volume = 14 | issue = 1 | pages = 158–164 | date =Winter 1992 | jstor = 4336635 }} | |||
* {{Cite journal | last = Lofreda | first = Beth | title = Of Stallions and Sycophants: Camille Paglia's ''Sexual Personae'' | journal = ] | publisher = ]| location=Durham, North Carolina|volume = 30 | issue = 30| pages = 121–124 | doi = 10.2307/466472 | jstor = 466472 | date = 1992 }} | |||
* {{Cite journal| first = Mary Rose | last = Kasraie |title = Book Reviews: ''Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson'' by Camille Paglia | journal = ] | publisher = ]| location=Atlanta, Georgia| volume = 58 | issue = 4 | pages = 132–135 | doi = 10.2307/3201015 | jstor = 3201015 | date = November 1993 }} | |||
* {{Cite journal |first = Alison| last = Booth | title = The Mother of All Cultures: Camille Paglia and Feminist Mythologies | journal = ] | publisher = ] | location=Gambier, Ohio| volume = 21 | issue = 1 | pages = 27–45 | date =Winter 1999 | jstor = 4337811 }} | |||
* {{Cite journal | last = Sheets | first = Robin Ann | title = Book Reviews: ''Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson'' by Camille Paglia | journal = ] | volume = 2 | issue = 2 | pages = 205–298 | publisher = ] | date = October 1991 | jstor = 3704039 }} | |||
* {{Cite journal | last = Ebert | first = Teresa L. | title = Review: The Politics of the Outrageous | journal = ] | volume = 9 | issue = 1 | pages = 12–13 | publisher = ] | doi = 10.2307/4021115 | jstor = 4021115 | date = October 1991 }} | |||
* {{cite book | last = Noble | first = Marianne | contribution = Notes to Chapter 5 (note 1) | editor-last = Noble | editor-first = Marianne | title = The masochistic pleasures of sentimental literature | url = https://archive.org/details/masochisticpleas00nobl_262 | url-access = limited | pages = –226 | publisher = Princeton University Press | location = Princeton, New Jersey | year = 2000 | isbn = 9780691009377 }} | |||
* {{Cite journal | last = Simons | first = Judy | title = Book Reviews: ''Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson'' by Camille Paglia | journal = ] | volume = 45 | issue = 179 | pages = 451–452 | publisher = ] | doi = 10.1093/res/XLV.179.451 | jstor = 518881 | date = August 1994 }}</ref> ] described ''Sexual Personae'' as "a fine disturbing book" that "seeks to attack the reader's emotions as well as his or her prejudices".<ref>{{cite news | last= Burgess | first = Anthony | author-link = Anthony Burgess |date= April 27, 1990 | title= Creatures of decadent light and violent darkness: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson |newspaper= ] | publisher=Independent Print Ltd.| location = London, England| page = 19 }}</ref> | |||
=== ''Sex, Art and American Culture'' (1992) === | |||
{{external media| float = right| video1 = , ]}} | |||
''Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays'' is a collection of short pieces, many published previously as editorials or reviews, and some transcripts of interviews.<ref name="eagle-1992-12-20"/> The essays cover such subjects as ], ], rock music, ], the ], rape, ], ], ], ], and ]. It made ] for paperbacks.<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/10/books/paperback-best-sellers-january-10-1993.html |title=Paperback Best Sellers | work=The New York Times | date= January 10, 1993}}</ref> | |||
=== ''Vamps and Tramps'' (1994) === | |||
''Vamps and Tramps: New Essays'' is a collection of 42 short articles and a long essay, "No Law in the Arena: a Pagan Theory of Sexuality". It also contains a collection of cartoons from newspapers about Paglia. Writing for ''The New York Times'', Wendy Steiner wrote "Comic, camp, outspoken, Ms. Paglia throws an absurdist shoe into the ponderous wheels of ]".<ref>{{cite news | first = Wendy | last = Steiner | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/books/advertisements-for-themselves.html | title = Advertisements for Themselves | newspaper =]|location=New York City|date = November 20, 1994 |access-date=October 4, 2018}}</ref> ], also writing for ''The New York Times'', wrote: "Her writings on education ... are highly persuasive, just as some of her essays on the perils of regulating pornography and the puritanical excesses of the women's movement radiate a fierce common sense ... Unfortunately, Ms. Paglia has a way of undermining her more interesting arguments with flip, hyperbolic declarations".<ref>{{cite news | first = Michiko | last = Kakutani | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/15/books/books-of-the-times-the-rise-of-a-self-proclaimed-phenomenon.html | title = The Rise of a Self-Proclaimed Phenomenon | newspaper = ] |location=New York City|date = November 15, 1994|access-date=October 4, 2018}}</ref> | |||
=== ''The Birds'' === | |||
In 1998, in commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the release of ]'s film '']'', the ] commissioned Paglia to write a book about the film. The book interprets the film as "in the main line of British Romanticism descending from the raw nature-tableaux and sinister femme-fatales of ]".<ref>{{cite book|first=John P.|last=McCombe|chapter=The Birds and Hitchcock's Hyper-Romantic Vision|editor1-first=Marshall|editor1-last=Deutelbaum|editor2-first=Leland A.|editor2-last=Poague|title=A Hitchcock Reader|publisher=]|location=Hoboken, New Jersey|year= 2009|isbn=978-1405155571|page=266}}</ref> Paglia uses a ] framework to interpret the film as portraying "a release of primitive forces of sex and appetite that have been subdued but never fully tamed".<ref>McCombe p.267</ref> | |||
=== ''Break, Blow, Burn'' (2005) === | |||
''Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems'' is a collection of 43 short selections of verse with an accompanying essay by Paglia.<ref name="nyt-2005-03-27"> | |||
{{Cite news | |||
| title=Well Versed | |||
| last=James | |||
| first=Clive | |||
| date=March 27, 2005 | |||
| url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/books/review/break-blow-burn-well-versed.html | |||
| work=The New York Times | |||
}}</ref> The collection is oriented primarily to those unfamiliar with the works.<ref name="nyt-2005-03-27"/> ] wrote that Paglia tends to focus on American works as it moves from ] forward through time, with ], following ], as the last European discussed,<ref name="nyt-2005-03-27"/> but emphasized her range of sympathy and her ability to juxtapose and unite distinct art forms in her analysis.<ref name="nyt-2005-03-27"/> | |||
=== ''Glittering Images'' (2012) === | |||
{{Main|Glittering Images}} | |||
'']'' is a series of essays about notable works of art from ancient to modern times, published in October 2012.<ref name="random house"> on Random House website.</ref> Writer John Adams of '']'' was skeptical of the book, accusing it of being "so agenda driven and so riddled with polemic asides that its potential to persuade is forever being compromised".<ref name=on-art>{{cite news|last=Adams|first=John|title=Paglia on Art|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/glittering-images-by-camille-paglia.html|date=November 30, 2012|work=The New York Times|access-date=July 7, 2014}}</ref> Gary Rosen of '']'', however, praised the book's "impressive range" and accessibility to readers.<ref name=WSJ1>{{cite news|last=Rosen|first=Gary|title=The Pagan Aesthetic|url=https://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390443675404578058504002593338|work=The Wall Street Journal|date=October 16, 2012|access-date=February 7, 2014}}</ref> | |||
=== ''Free Women, Free Men'' (2017) === | |||
{{main|Free Women, Free Men}} | |||
{{external media| float = right| video1 = , ]}} | |||
''Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, and Feminism'' is a series of essays from 1990 onward.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/126099/free-women-free-men-by-camille-paglia/9780375424779/ |title=Free Women, Free Men |access-date=March 15, 2017}}</ref> ] in ''The New York Times'' wrote Paglia's essays address two main targets: modern feminism, which, Paglia writes, "has become a catchall vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses," and modern American universities, of which she asks, "How is it possible that today's academic left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and overregulation of student life?"<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/books/review-camille-paglia-free-women-free-men.html|title=From Camille Paglia, 'Free Women, Free Men' and No Sacred Cows|last=Garner|first=Dwight|date=March 23, 2017|work=The New York Times|access-date=May 30, 2017|issn=0362-4331}}</ref> | |||
=== ''Provocations'' (2018) === | |||
Paglia's fourth essay collection, ''Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education'', was published by ] on October 9, 2018.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Paglia|first=Camille|url=|title=Provocations: collected essays|date=2018|publisher=Pantheon Books |isbn=978-1-5247-4689-6|language=English|oclc=1019883092}}</ref> | |||
== Works == | |||
* ''The Androgyne in Literature and Art'' (1974; PhD thesis) | |||
* '']'' (1990) {{ISBN|0-679-73579-8}} | |||
* ''Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays'' (1992) {{ISBN|0-679-74101-1}} | |||
* '']'' (1993), documentary film | |||
* ''Vamps and Tramps: New Essays'' (1994) {{ISBN|0-679-75120-3}} | |||
* ''The Birds'' (]) (1998) {{ISBN|0-851-70651-7}} | |||
* ''Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems'' (2005) {{ISBN|0-375-42084-3}} | |||
* '']'' (2012) {{ISBN|978-0-375-42460-1}} | |||
* '']'' (2017) {{ISBN|978-0-375424779}} | |||
* ''Provocations: Collected Essays'' (2018) {{ISBN|978-1-52474689-6}} | |||
== References == | |||
{{Reflist}} | |||
=== Sources === | |||
* {{Citation | last = Paglia | first = Camille | title = Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays | year = 1992 | publisher = Knopf Doubleday Publishing | isbn = 0-679-74101-1}} | |||
* {{citation | last = Paglia | first = Camille | title = Vamps and Tramps: New Essays | url = https://archive.org/details/vampstrampsnewes00pagl | url-access = limited | publisher = ] | location = New York | year = 1994 | isbn = 978-0-67975120-5 |author-mask= 3}} | |||
== External links == | |||
{{Portal|United States|Biography|Feminism}} | |||
* {{Wikiquote-inline}} | |||
* {{Commons category-inline}} | |||
* | |||
* {{C-SPAN|27017}} | |||
** | |||
* {{IMDb name|0656468}} | |||
* Russell Walter (2023). | |||
* Lyons, Donald (March 2024). ''The New Criterion'', Vol. 42, No. 7. | |||
{{Criticism of postmodernism}} | |||
{{Authority control}} | |||
{{DEFAULTSORT:Paglia, Camille}} | |||
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Latest revision as of 05:23, 8 January 2025
American feminist academic and critic (born 1947)
Camille Paglia | |
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Paglia in 2017 | |
Born | Camille Anna Paglia (1947-04-02) April 2, 1947 (age 77) Endicott, New York, U.S. |
Occupation | Professor, cultural critic |
Education | Binghamton University (BA) Yale University (MA, PhD) |
Subjects | Popular culture, art, poetry, sex, film, feminism, politics |
Literary movement | Individualist feminism |
Camille Anna Paglia (/ˈpɑːliə/; born April 2, 1947) is an American academic, social critic and feminist. Paglia was a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1984 until the university's closure in 2024. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
Personal life
Paglia was born in Endicott, New York, the eldest child of Pasquale and Lydia Anne (née Colapietro) Paglia. All four of her grandparents were born in Italy. Her mother emigrated to the United States at five years old from Ceccano, in the province of Frosinone, Lazio, Italy. Paglia has stated that her father's side of the family was from the Campanian towns of Avellino, Benevento, and Caserta. Paglia was raised Catholic, and attended primary school in rural Oxford, New York, where her family lived in a working farmhouse. Her father, a veteran of World War II, taught at the Oxford Academy high school and exposed his young daughter to art through books he brought home about French art history. In 1957, her family moved to Syracuse, New York, so that her father could begin graduate school; he eventually became a professor of Romance languages at Le Moyne College. She attended the Edward Smith Elementary School, T. Aaron Levy Junior High, and Nottingham Senior High School. In 1992, Carmelia Metosh, her Latin teacher for three years, said, "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made (in class), she had to challenge them. She made good points then, as she does now." Paglia thanked Metosh in the acknowledgments to Sexual Personae, later describing her as "the dragon lady of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and school boards".
During her stays at a summer Girl Scout camp in Thendara, New York, she took on a variety of new names, including Anastasia (her confirmation name, inspired by the film Anastasia), Stacy, and Stanley. A crucially significant event for her was when an outhouse exploded after she poured too much quicklime into the latrine. "That symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology... and I would drop the bomb into it".
For more than a decade, Paglia was the partner of artist Alison Maddex. Paglia legally adopted Maddex's son (who was born in 2002). In 2007, the couple separated but remained "harmonious co-parents", in the words of Paglia, who lived two miles (three kilometers) apart.
Paglia is an atheist, and has stated she has "a very spiritual mystic view of the universe". She has expressed interest in astrology and has written about it in several of her works, including Sexual Personae: "I'm an astrologer – people don't mention this! I mean, everyone's attacked me for everything else. I mean, I'm an astrologer – it's right in my book. I endorse astrology. I believe in astrology. Will someone attack me for that? No!"
Education
Paglia entered Harpur College at Binghamton University in 1964. The same year, Paglia's poem "Atrophy" was published in the local newspaper. She later said that she was trained to read literature by poet Milton Kessler, who "believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature ... And oh did I believe in that". She graduated from Harpur as class valedictorian in 1968.
According to Paglia, while in college she punched a "marauding drunk", and takes pride in having been put on probation for committing 39 pranks.
Paglia attended Yale as a graduate student, and she claims to have been the only open lesbian at Yale Graduate School from 1968 to 1972. At Yale, Paglia quarreled with Rita Mae Brown, whom she later characterized as "then darkly nihilist," and argued with the New Haven, Connecticut, Women's Liberation Rock Band when they dismissed The Rolling Stones as sexist. Paglia was mentored by Harold Bloom. Sexual Personae was then titled "The Androgynous Dream: the image of the androgyne as it appears in literature and is embodied in the psyche of the artist, with reference to the visual arts and the cinema."
In 1973, Paglia drove to an appearance by Susan Sontag at Dartmouth, hoping to arrange for her to speak at Bennington, but found it difficult to find the money for Sontag's speaking fee. Paglia staged a poster campaign urging students to attend Sontag's appearance. Sontag arrived at Bennington Carriage Barn, where she was to speak, more than an hour late, and then began reading what Paglia recalled as a "boring and bleak" short story about "nothing" in the style of a French New Novel.
Career
In the autumn of 1972, Paglia began teaching at Bennington College, which hired her in part thanks to a recommendation from Harold Bloom. At Bennington, she befriended the philosopher James Fessenden, who first taught there in the same semester.
Through her study of the classics and the scholarly work of Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, Erich Neumann and others, Paglia developed a theory of sexual history that contradicted a number of ideas fashionable at the time, hence her criticism of Marija Gimbutas, Carolyn Heilbrun, Kate Millett and others. She laid out her ideas on matriarchy, androgyny, homosexuality, sadomasochism and other topics in her Yale PhD thesis Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, which she defended in December 1974. In September 1976, she gave a public lecture drawing on that dissertation, in which she discussed Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, followed by remarks on Diana Ross, Gracie Allen, Yul Brynner, and Stéphane Audran.
Paglia wrote that she "nearly came to blows with the founding members of the women's studies program at the State University of New York at Albany, when they categorically denied that hormones influence human experience or behavior". Similar fights with feminists and academics culminated in a 1978 incident which led her to resign from Bennington; after a lengthy standoff with the administration, Paglia accepted a settlement from the college and resigned in 1979.
Paglia finished Sexual Personae in the early 1980s, but could not get it published. She supported herself with visiting and part-time teaching jobs at Yale, Wesleyan, and other Connecticut colleges. Her paper, "The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queene", was published in English Literary Renaissance, Winter 1979, and her dissertation was cited by J. Hillis Miller in his April 1980 article "Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation", in Journal of Religion in Literature, but her academic career was otherwise stalled. In a 1995 letter to Boyd Holmes, she recalled: "I earned a little extra money by doing some local features reporting for a New Haven alternative newspaper (The Advocate) in the early 1980s". She wrote articles on New Haven's historic pizzerias and on an old house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
In 1984, she joined the faculty of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which merged in 1987 with the Philadelphia College of Art to become the University of the Arts.
Paglia is on the editorial board of the classics and humanities journal Arion. She wrote a regular column for Salon.com from 1995 to 2001, and again from 2007 to 2009. Paglia resumed writing a Salon.com column in 2016.
Paglia cooperated with Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock in their writing of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. Rollyson and Paddock note that Sontag "had her lawyer put our publisher on notice" when she realized she was to be the subject.
Paglia participates in the decennial poll of film professionals conducted by Sight and Sound which asks participants to submit a list of what they believe to be the ten greatest films of all time. According to her responses to the poll in 2002, 2012, and 2022, the films Paglia holds in highest regard include Ben-Hur, Blowup, Citizen Kane, La Dolce Vita, The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, Orphée, Persona, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Ten Commandments, and Vertigo.
In 2005, Paglia was named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals by the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect. In 2012, an article in The New York Times remarked that "nyone who has been following the body count of the culture wars over the past decades knows Paglia". Paglia has said that she is willing to have her entire career judged on the basis of her composition of what she considers to be "probably the most important sentence that she has ever written": "God is man's greatest idea."
Views
Feminism
Though Paglia admires Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex ("the supreme work of modern feminism... its deep learning and massive argument are unsurpassed") as well as Germaine Greer, Time critic Martha Duffy writes that Paglia "does not hesitate to hurl brazen insults" at several feminists. In an interview, Paglia stated that to be effective, one has to "name names"; criticism should be concrete. Paglia stated that many critics "escape into abstractions", rendering their criticism "intellectualized and tame". Paglia was known as one of the scholars and feminists that theorized American singer Madonna within feminism and for which publications such as Vogue called her the "high priestess of post-feminism".
Paglia accused Greer of becoming "a drone in three years" as a result of her early success; Paglia has also criticized the work of feminist activist Diana Fuss. Elaine Showalter calls Paglia "unique in the hyperbole and virulence of her hostility to virtually all the prominent feminist activists, public figures, writers and scholars of her generation", mentioning Carolyn Heilbrun, Judith Butler, Carol Gilligan, Marilyn French, Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, Susan Thomases, and Hillary Clinton as targets of her criticism. Paglia accused Kate Millett of starting "the repressive, Stalinist style in feminist criticism." Paglia has repeatedly criticized Patricia Ireland, former president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), calling her a "sanctimonious", unappealing role model for women whose "smug, arrogant" attitude is accompanied by "painfully limited processes of thought". Paglia contends that under Ireland's leadership, NOW "damaged and marginalized the women's movement".
In 1999, Martha Nussbaum wrote an essay called "The Professor of Parody", in which she criticized Judith Butler for retreating to abstract theory disconnected from real world problems. Paglia reacted to the essay by stating that the criticism was "long overdue", but characterized the criticism as "one PC diva turning against another". She criticized Nussbaum for failing to make her criticisms earlier while accusing her of borrowing Paglia's ideas without acknowledgement. She called Nussbaum's "preparation or instinct for sex analysis... dubious at best", but nevertheless stated that "Nussbaum is a genuine scholar who operates on a vastly higher intellectual level than Butler".
Many feminists have criticized Paglia; Christina Hoff Sommers calls her "Perhaps the most conspicuous target of feminist opprobrium," noting that the Women's Review of Books described Sexual Personae as patriarchy's "counter-assault on feminism". Some feminist critics have characterized Paglia as an "anti-feminist feminist", critical of central features of much contemporary feminism but holding out "her own special variety of feminist affirmation".
Naomi Wolf traded a series of sometimes personal attacks with Paglia throughout the early 1990s. In The New Republic, Wolf wrote that Paglia "poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters" and characterized Paglia as intellectually dishonest. In a 1991 speech, Paglia criticized Wolf for blaming anorexia on the media, calling Wolf a "twit". Gloria Steinem said of Paglia that, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic." Paglia called Steinem "the Stalin of feminism". Katha Pollitt calls Paglia one of a "seemingly endless parade of social critics have achieved celebrity by portraying not sexism but feminism as the problem". Pollitt writes that Paglia has glorified "male dominance", and has been able to get away with things "that might make even Rush Limbaugh blanch," because she is a woman.
Paglia's view that rape is sexually motivated has been endorsed by evolutionary psychologists Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer; they comment that "Paglia... urges women to be skeptical toward the feminist 'party line' on the subject, to become better informed about risk factors, and to use the information to lower their risk of rape".
In an essay critiquing the Hollywood/celebrity fad of "Girl Squads", made popular in 2015 by pop-icons like Taylor Swift, Paglia argued that rather than empowering women the cliquish practice actually harms the self-esteem of those who are not rich, famous, or attractive enough to belong to the group, while further defining women only by a very narrow, often sexualized stereotype. She challenged that to be truly empowering, these groups need to mentor, advise, and be more inclusive, for more women to realize their true, individual potential.
Transgender people
Though she has not transitioned, Paglia identifies as transgender. She reports having gender dysphoria since childhood, and says that "never once in my life have I felt female". She says that she was "donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on".
Nevertheless, Paglia says that she is "highly skeptical about the current transgender wave" which she thinks has been produced by "far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows". She writes that "In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity."
Paglia's views led to a petition demanding that the University of the Arts remove her from their faculty, but the university rejected it. Paglia considered it "a publicity stunt" and praised the university's "eloquent statement affirming academic freedom a landmark in contemporary education."
Climate change
See also: Climate change denialPaglia has long rejected the scientific consensus on global warming, which she describes as "the political agenda that has slowly accrued" around the issue of climate change. In a 2017 interview with The Weekly Standard, Paglia stated, "It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender."
French academia
Paglia is critical of the influence many postwar French writers have had on the humanities, claiming that universities are in the "thrall" of French post-structuralists; that in the works of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, she never once found a sentence that interested her.
However, Paglia's assessment of French writers is not purely negative. She has called Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) "brilliant and imperious" and she traces the lineage of her "dissident feminism", not from Betty Friedan but from Beauvoir. Paglia also identified Jean-Paul Sartre's work as part of a high period in literature. She has praised Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957) and Gilles Deleuze's Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1967), while finding both men's later work flawed. Of Gaston Bachelard, who influenced Paglia, she wrote " dignified yet fluid phenomenological descriptive method seemed to me ideal for art", adding that he was "the last modern French writer I took seriously".
Politics
Paglia characterizes herself as a libertarian. She opposes laws against prostitution, pornography, drugs, and abortion. She is also opposed to affirmative action laws. Some of her views have been characterized as conservative, although when asked in 2016 if she considers herself a cultural conservative she replied: "No, not at all... Conservative would mean I was cleaving to something past which was great, and no longer is... and Usually I'm not saying we should return to anything. I do believe we're moving inexorably into the future."
Paglia criticized Bill Clinton for not resigning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which she says "paralyzed the government for two years, leading directly to our blindsiding by 9/11". In the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, she voted for the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader " I detest the arrogant, corrupt superstructure of the Democratic Party, with which I remain stubbornly registered."
In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Paglia supported John Kerry, and in 2008 she supported Barack Obama. In 2012, she supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Paglia was highly critical of 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, calling her a "fraud" and a "liar". Paglia refused to support either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, indicating in a March Salon column that if Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party's nomination, she would either cast a write-in vote for Bernie Sanders or else vote for Green Party candidate Stein, as she did in 2012. Paglia later clarified in a statement that she would vote for Stein. In 2017, she stated that she is a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and for Jill Stein in the 2016 general election. For the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Paglia criticized the Democratic Party for lacking a coherent message and a strong candidate. She disavowed Sanders as being "way too old and creaky" and retracted her initial support for Kamala Harris for missing "a huge opportunity to play a moderating, statesmanlike role." Citing the "need to project steadiness, substance, and warmth," Paglia expressed interest in Cheri Bustos and Steve Bullock as potential candidates.
Child sexuality
In accordance with a highly politicised view of child abuse, Paglia notably commented in an interview in 1992: "In the case of Sinéad O'Connor, child abuse was justified". This was her response to the singer's action on Saturday Night Live, where she tore up a picture of the pope in protest of the unfolding child sexual abuse scandal surrounding the Catholic Church. In 1993, Paglia signed a manifesto supporting NAMBLA, a pederasty and pedophilia advocacy organization. In 1994, Paglia supported lowering the legal age of consent to 14. She noted in a 1995 interview with pro-pedophile activist Bill Andriette, "I fail to see what is wrong with erotic fondling with any age." In a 1997 Salon column, Paglia expressed the view that male pedophilia correlates with the heights of a civilization, stating "I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In Sexual Personae, I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization." Paglia noted in several interviews, as well as Sexual Personae, that she supported the legalization of certain forms of child pornography.
She later changed her views on the matter. In an interview for Radio New Zealand's Saturday Morning show, conducted on April 28, 2018, by Kim Hill, Paglia was asked, "Are you a libertarian on the issue of pedophilia?", to which she replied, "In terms of the present day, I think it's absolutely impossible to think we could reproduce the Athenian code of pedophilia, of boy-love, that was central to culture at that time. We must protect children, and I feel that very very strongly. The age of consent for sexual interactions between a boy and an older man is obviously disputed, at what point that should be. I used to think that fourteen (the way it is in some places in the world) was adequate. I no longer think that. I think young people need greater protection than that. This is one of those areas that we must confine to the realm of imagination and the history of the arts."
Books
Sexual Personae (1990)
Main article: Sexual PersonaePaglia's Sexual Personae was rejected by at least seven different publishers before it was published by Yale University Press, where it became a best-seller. 'Paglia called it her "prison book", commenting, "I felt like Cervantes, Genet. It took all the resources of being Catholic to cut myself off and sit in my cell." Sexual Personae has been called an "energetic, Freud-friendly reading of Western art", one that seemed "heretical and perverse", at the height of political correctness; according to Daniel Nester, its characterization of "William Blake as the British Marquis de Sade or Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as 'self-ruling hermaphrodites who cannot mate' still pricks up many an English major's ears".
In the book, Paglia argues that human nature has an inherently dangerous Dionysian or chthonic aspect, especially in regard to sexuality. Culture and civilization are created by men and represent an attempt to contain that force. Women are powerful, too, but as natural forces, and both marriage and religion are means to contain chaotic forces. A best seller, it was described by Terry Teachout in a New York Times book review as being both "intellectually stimulating" and "exasperating". Sexual Personae received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars. Anthony Burgess described Sexual Personae as "a fine disturbing book" that "seeks to attack the reader's emotions as well as his or her prejudices".
Sex, Art and American Culture (1992)
External videos | |
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Presentation by Paglia on Sex, Art and American Culture, October 26, 1994, C-SPAN |
Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays is a collection of short pieces, many published previously as editorials or reviews, and some transcripts of interviews. The essays cover such subjects as Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, rock music, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination, rape, bodybuilding, Marlon Brando, drag, Milton Kessler, and academia. It made The New York Times bestseller list for paperbacks.
Vamps and Tramps (1994)
Vamps and Tramps: New Essays is a collection of 42 short articles and a long essay, "No Law in the Arena: a Pagan Theory of Sexuality". It also contains a collection of cartoons from newspapers about Paglia. Writing for The New York Times, Wendy Steiner wrote "Comic, camp, outspoken, Ms. Paglia throws an absurdist shoe into the ponderous wheels of academia". Michiko Kakutani, also writing for The New York Times, wrote: "Her writings on education ... are highly persuasive, just as some of her essays on the perils of regulating pornography and the puritanical excesses of the women's movement radiate a fierce common sense ... Unfortunately, Ms. Paglia has a way of undermining her more interesting arguments with flip, hyperbolic declarations".
The Birds
In 1998, in commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, the British Film Institute commissioned Paglia to write a book about the film. The book interprets the film as "in the main line of British Romanticism descending from the raw nature-tableaux and sinister femme-fatales of Coleridge". Paglia uses a psychoanalytic framework to interpret the film as portraying "a release of primitive forces of sex and appetite that have been subdued but never fully tamed".
Break, Blow, Burn (2005)
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems is a collection of 43 short selections of verse with an accompanying essay by Paglia. The collection is oriented primarily to those unfamiliar with the works. Clive James wrote that Paglia tends to focus on American works as it moves from Shakespeare forward through time, with Yeats, following Coleridge, as the last European discussed, but emphasized her range of sympathy and her ability to juxtapose and unite distinct art forms in her analysis.
Glittering Images (2012)
Main article: Glittering ImagesGlittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars is a series of essays about notable works of art from ancient to modern times, published in October 2012. Writer John Adams of The New York Times Book Review was skeptical of the book, accusing it of being "so agenda driven and so riddled with polemic asides that its potential to persuade is forever being compromised". Gary Rosen of The Wall Street Journal, however, praised the book's "impressive range" and accessibility to readers.
Free Women, Free Men (2017)
Main article: Free Women, Free MenExternal videos | |
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Presentation by Paglia on Free Women, Free Men, March 20, 2017, C-SPAN |
Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, and Feminism is a series of essays from 1990 onward. Dwight Garner in The New York Times wrote Paglia's essays address two main targets: modern feminism, which, Paglia writes, "has become a catchall vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses," and modern American universities, of which she asks, "How is it possible that today's academic left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and overregulation of student life?"
Provocations (2018)
Paglia's fourth essay collection, Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education, was published by Pantheon on October 9, 2018.
Works
- The Androgyne in Literature and Art (1974; PhD thesis)
- Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) ISBN 0-679-73579-8
- Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992) ISBN 0-679-74101-1
- Glennda and Camille Do Downtown (1993), documentary film
- Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (1994) ISBN 0-679-75120-3
- The Birds (BFI Film Classics) (1998) ISBN 0-851-70651-7
- Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005) ISBN 0-375-42084-3
- Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars (2012) ISBN 978-0-375-42460-1
- Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, and Feminism (2017) ISBN 978-0-375424779
- Provocations: Collected Essays (2018) ISBN 978-1-52474689-6
References
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- ^ Romano, Karen (December 9, 1990). "Camille Paglia's 'Sexual Personae' provokes amusement, outrage". The News. Boca Raton, Florida: Knight-Ridder.
- Teachout, Terry (July 22, 1990). "Siding With the Men". The New York Times. New York City. Retrieved October 4, 2018.
- See the following:
- Gilbert, Sandra M. (Winter 1992). "Review: Freaked Out: Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae". The Kenyon Review. 14 (1). Gambier, Ohio: Kenyon College: 158–164. JSTOR 4336635.
- Lofreda, Beth (1992). "Of Stallions and Sycophants: Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae". Social Text. 30 (30). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press: 121–124. doi:10.2307/466472. JSTOR 466472.
- Kasraie, Mary Rose (November 1993). "Book Reviews: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia". South Atlantic Review. 58 (4). Atlanta, Georgia: South Atlantic Modern Language Association: 132–135. doi:10.2307/3201015. JSTOR 3201015.
- Booth, Alison (Winter 1999). "The Mother of All Cultures: Camille Paglia and Feminist Mythologies". The Kenyon Review. 21 (1). Gambier, Ohio: Kenyon College: 27–45. JSTOR 4337811.
- Sheets, Robin Ann (October 1991). "Book Reviews: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 2 (2). University of Texas Press: 205–298. JSTOR 3704039.
- Ebert, Teresa L. (October 1991). "Review: The Politics of the Outrageous". The Women's Review of Books. 9 (1). Wellesley Centers for Women: 12–13. doi:10.2307/4021115. JSTOR 4021115.
- Noble, Marianne (2000). "Notes to Chapter 5 (note 1)". In Noble, Marianne (ed.). The masochistic pleasures of sentimental literature. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 225–226. ISBN 9780691009377.
- Simons, Judy (August 1994). "Book Reviews: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia". The Review of English Studies. 45 (179). Oxford University Press: 451–452. doi:10.1093/res/XLV.179.451. JSTOR 518881.
- Burgess, Anthony (April 27, 1990). "Creatures of decadent light and violent darkness: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson". The Independent. London, England: Independent Print Ltd. p. 19.
- "Paperback Best Sellers". The New York Times. January 10, 1993.
- Steiner, Wendy (November 20, 1994). "Advertisements for Themselves". The New York Times. New York City. Retrieved October 4, 2018.
- Kakutani, Michiko (November 15, 1994). "The Rise of a Self-Proclaimed Phenomenon". The New York Times. New York City. Retrieved October 4, 2018.
- McCombe, John P. (2009). "The Birds and Hitchcock's Hyper-Romantic Vision". In Deutelbaum, Marshall; Poague, Leland A. (eds.). A Hitchcock Reader. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. p. 266. ISBN 978-1405155571.
- McCombe p.267
- ^ James, Clive (March 27, 2005). "Well Versed". The New York Times.
- Book description on Random House website.
- Rosen, Gary (October 16, 2012). "The Pagan Aesthetic". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved February 7, 2014.
- "Free Women, Free Men". Retrieved March 15, 2017.
- Garner, Dwight (March 23, 2017). "From Camille Paglia, 'Free Women, Free Men' and No Sacred Cows". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 30, 2017.
- Paglia, Camille (2018). Provocations: collected essays. Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-1-5247-4689-6. OCLC 1019883092.
Sources
- Paglia, Camille (1992), Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays, Knopf Doubleday Publishing, ISBN 0-679-74101-1
- ——— (1994), Vamps and Tramps: New Essays, New York: Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-67975120-5
External links
- Quotations related to Camille Paglia at Wikiquote
- Media related to Camille Paglia at Wikimedia Commons
- Salon Articles by Camille Paglia
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Camille Paglia at IMDb
- Russell Walter (2023). "Camille Paglia on Masculinity & Femininity"
- Lyons, Donald (March 2024). Sex, the Sixties & Camille Paglia. The New Criterion, Vol. 42, No. 7.
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