Word: paglia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bubbling by printing a dozen letters, several solicited, from cultural pillars of various persuasions. Tony Kushner, author of the Pulitzer-prizewinning Angels in America, said he felt "dissed." Croce, he argued, has her semantics wrong; she uses the word victims to describe "politically engaged progressive people." Libertarian terror Camille Paglia largely agreed with Croce but seized the occasion to chide her for not paying proper attention to the pop heroes Paglia champions. In short, the powwow was predictable but entertaining...
Academics ought to have a longer shelf life than pop stars. So maybe Madonna wasn't such a swell role model for Camille Paglia, a humanities professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. Sexual Personae, a rambunctious survey of gender identities published in 1990, made Paglia into feminism's Material Girl. In a whiny time in America that sanctified women as victims, she celebrated woman's erotic and emotional majesty. Just like that, she was the hot intellectual starlet...
Alas, she loved notoriety even more than it loved her. The huffy reception being given Vamps & Tramps (Vintage; 532 pages), her paperback volume of new and recent essays, journalism, TV interviews and effluvia, suggests that Paglia is in her 16th minute of fame--like Madonna at her current ebb with an exasperated public. This is a shame, since it discounts Paglia's rangy, roguish intelligence and genius for mischief making...
Vamps & Tramps is an apt title, and not just because, as the author writes, it ``evokes the missing sexual personae of contemporary feminism''-- the drag queens and prostitutes who are the stars of her cosmology. The title also summarizes Paglia's method. Toss her a pop-cultural subject, and she'll vamp on it, often brilliantly. Invoke her prim sisters in ``the feminist establishment,'' and she'll tramp on them with the Cuban heels of her rhetoric. Into any fray she bursts, a media Medusa, a Valkyrie for hire, Penthesilea fighting for Amazon rights. Is she fair? Nah--fair...
...homosexuals undermine civilization, or even the epithet "little lady's sewing circle," that he bestowed on the Committee on Women's Studies a couple of years back. Granted, it would be unfair to expect the professor to be quite so provocative all the time (though his old friend Camille Paglia seems to be having a bit more luck). But calling the Harvard faculty "a bunch of liberals?" That's so mundane as to be pathetic...