Thursday 30 August, 2001
Professor Paglia: Intellectual provocateur
She has been described as brilliant, outrageous, the intellectual pin-up of the 90s, an anti feminist, feminist, a woman warrior, a crackpot, the most original critic of our day and an intellectual provocateur. Like or loath her, Professor Camille Paglia is undoubtedly an extremely controversial academic.
As a writer she has commented on film, poetry and most notably art. She is author of Sexual Personae, Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a dialogue on religion, sexuality, art and nature.
As well as authoring a regular internet column Paglia is currently Professor of Humanities at the American University of Arts in Philadelphia. Professor Camille Paglia appears in People and Places, About Face.
Professor Camille Paglia has a view on most subjects, but what sets her apart from most modern thinkers is that she is not afraid to speak her mind. She is without question, a product of the American society within which she has lived for most of her life and claims that people have difficulty in accepting her provocative thoughts because:
'I'm not like Susan Sontag who is a very austere, very imposing, tall and rather mysterious woman. I'm more like a Joan Rivers, a comedian. I identify very strongly with sort of a television, a brand, and a physical comedy of Lucille Ball person. This was the problem, how to reconcile people's view of a thinker with that of a prankster.'
Childhood, sexuality and era
By her own admission her childhood, her sexuality and her era have defined Paglia. The daughter of Italian immigrants, she was born in 1947 in the US.
Her four grandparents and her mother were all born in Italy, but her father was born in the US and the family embraced American culture whole heatedly. Even now she is proud of her American heritage:
'Most intellectuals tend to be very anti American, but I am pro because I understand there is no way I could have lived my life as an independent woman, a lesbian and a free thinker in Italy.'
She grew up in New York and until the age of 14, when her sister Lenore was born, Paglia was an only child. Her father instilled in her a need for independence and for free thought. Of her childhood she has commented:
'My earliest memory is of observing. My parents took me everywhere with them. With them I was constantly listening to adult conversations, they were always talking about American culture, analysing it because they were Italian aliens. I always had that different perspective.'
At school she devoted herself to study and by the time she reached high school her passion for the aviatrix Amelia Earheart was the subject of articles. Her scholarly nature she has claimed made her something of a 'freak', this coupled with her growing awareness of her own sexuality has led her to comment:
| 'I'm a freak of nature. There is something really odd about me. I honestly think that I am right in the middle of being a man and woman.' | |
Had Paglia grown up in Italy she believes that, like her cousin, she would have become her nun. She comes from a strong Roman Catholic heritage and in her eyes becoming a nun would have safeguarded her independence. Instead Paglia's independence was fostered in the freedom that the 1960s era afforded. She comments:
'I do feel that the monks and the nuns of old were very physical and there's a long tradition of finding some physical object in the real world to make a parallel to the spiritual truths.'
'I felt that as a member of the 1960s generation that I wanted to dramatise the way that thought is grounded in the senses in the physical world. I dislike abstraction for its own sake. I think that is what I felt was going to be the revolution of my generation, alas my peers are lost because they took too many drugs. I think their brains were destroyed.'
Sexual Personae
In the early 1990s, Paglia had been working for six years at the American University of Arts in Philadelphia. In addition to teaching she also worked on her book, Sexual Personae, an extension of her 1960s dissertation, which was finally published in February 1990. The book was launched with little fuss and at the age of 43 Paglia was still relatively unknown.
The book is essentially concerned with the history of art, but far from being a straightforward historical account, Paglia tried to show how art and literature are infused with sexuality. She comments:
'I was attempting to challenge what was then the academic orthodoxy. I was trying to show the way sexuality infused literature and art, how a great deal of rather perverse eroticism was present as a subtext in so many great works from Leonardo de Vinci's Mona Lisa to Donatello's David.'
'By the time it burst on the world a whole other kind of orthodoxy had taken over. It will remain to a cultural historian to figure out why so many people were so opposed to the idea of an independent thinking and speaking woman.'
Feminist criticism
Within a few pages of Sexual Personae, Paglia distinguishes women from men, claiming that men have a need for creativity, whilst women are more earth bound. Feminists have argued that this suggests that women can not aspire to the same level of creativity as men.
On this matter Paglia comments:
'It's simply saying that women are naturally more grounded, have a natural sense of physical reality, feel more connected to the Universe because of the complex hormonal system in their bodies that kicks in at puberty…men feel incomplete, their identities are in fact wounded from their separation from their mothers. And that art is simply one of the many ways that men try to supplement their wounded identities.'
| 'I represent a dissident wing of feminism, the pro rock and roll, pro Hollywood, pro popular culture wing ' | |
Popular culture
Since writing Sexual Personae Paglia has written several columns and has become something of a global media star.
The fact that at home Paglia has five television sets, each tuned into different channels and that she jots down her thoughts whilst watching, is very revealing.
In both her writing and in interview, she demonstrates an amazing speed of thought, leaping form one subject to the next, and has often been criticised for her ability to merge subjects of 'high art' with the themes of popular culture.
When Paglia placed the film star, Elizabeth Taylor and the pop icon Madonna as top of her list of most admired women, she contradicted all established ideas of strength and feminism. She comments:
'I regard the great Hollywood style of the sex symbol as belonging to the history of art, the great history of art. I saw a direct line from Botticelli's Birth of Venus to Elizabeth Taylor…I do feel that the wing of feminism that took control in the 70s and 80s did not speak for all feminists.'
'I represent a dissident wing of feminism that was suppressed, the pro rock and roll, pro Hollywood, pro popular culture wing that finally burst out again thanks to Madonna in the 1990s.'
The code of practice by which Paglia lives by – 'Honour and honesty. Be forthright, not back stabbing, totally simple' –has led her to break the mould of the serious thinker.
She claims to not only be a feminist but a reformer and is forever challenging he way in which the world is viewed.
But does she really believe everything that she espouses or does she just throw some of it in for effect? She replies:
'What has to be remembered is that I am a student of Oscar Wilde… I think that Oscar Wilde had the same kind of combination of belief and yet theatrical flair.'
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| The meaning of the joke |
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At college in the 1960s Paglia was known as something of a prankster. She was even put on probation for '40 major pranks’ but as she explains, her jokes were not without meaning:
‘I would do things like remove the clocks from the walls and tuck them into the Counsellors beds giving them a terrible turn when they returned drunk in the middle of the night.'
'I had shaving cream that I made question marks with on the door, it removed the varnish, but I was intending to make people think of metaphysical epistemological questions about reality.’ |
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