Word: paglia
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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 (Amy Fisher, Lorena Bobbitt), and she'll vamp on it, often brilliantly. Invoke her prim sisters in "the feminist establishment" (Anita Hill, Catharine MacKinnon), 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...
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 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; $15), 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 mischiefmaking...
...help me imagine what Harvard would be like under the rule of Lin, allow me to invoke the notorious and always amusing academic iconoclast Camille Paglia...
...that nice?" said Paglia, mocking a college administrator of today. "How nice that you're gay! This is wonderful. We're going to help you be gay. Really, there's no need...