MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Camille Paglia is an American cultural critic known for her polemical ideas on feminism and sexuality. A controversial figure – identifying herself as transgender – but rejecting contemporary gender studies, she is often described as an “antifeminist-feminist”. Her most famous and lengthy publication Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate "the unity and continuity of Western culture" through the study of sexual personae from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Deriving her ideas from the theories of various writers including the Marquis de Sade, Oswald Spengler, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as taking the Nietzschean idea of dichotomy between Dionysian and Apollonian forces in cultural activity, Paglia builds her theory of Western culture upon sexual stereotypes, fixed sexual archetypes and a biological basis of sex. According to Paglia, culture and civilisation was created by men to oppose and contain the chaotic (or ‘chthonic’ to use Paglia’s term) and self-destructive nature of women. The aggressive nature of male sexuality is seen as a driving force in culture – Paglia argues that "amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics". Paglia’s comparisons of select examples of art and literature from high and low cultures, and controversial enthusiasm for pornography and male paedophilia are, as argued by some critics, merely gimmicks, which mask her glorification of male dominance and the unquestionable conservative trajectory of Western culture.