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Text and Performance Quarterly

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The performing artist‐intellectual:

The personae and personality of
Camille Paglia
John Rodden
Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: John Rodden (1996) The performing artist‐intellectual: The personae
and personality of Camille Paglia, Text and Performance Quarterly, 16:1, 62-82, DOI:
10.1080/10462939609366133

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 Text and Performance Quarterly
16 (1996): 62-82

A TPQ Interview
The Performing Artist-Intellectual:
The Personae and Personality of
Camille Paglia
JOHN RODDEN
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I
Camille Paglia is the Oscar Wilde of American academe. In the tradition of Oscar, who
quipped to US customs officials in 1882 that he had "nothing to declare except my genius, "
Paglia has made her own egoistic personality an object of interest and contention even
greater than her work. She is the Wildean critic as artist who has indeed so effectively
identified her own intellectual-academic personae with her challenging, sometimes per-
versely provocative ideas that almost everything she now says or does arouses controversy—
and she claims to seek that effect quite consciously and deliberately. In the last four years,
she has conducted a frontal assault on the literary academy and intelligent-
sia, skewering the "word-centered Establishment" and promoting an anti-literary aesthet-
ics honoring image, gesture, and motion.
For Paglia is the model of what might be called "the performing artist-intellectual."
Although she teaches literature, writes literary criticism, and holds an English Ph.D. from
Yale University, Paglia is not a literary or academic intellectual at all. She is an endlessly
self-referential dramatist, indeed a breast-beating melodramatist, histrionically ringing
down the curtain on staid English department textualists. Opposed to what she considers
their fetishiting of language and ideology, Paglia rejects the traditional stylistics of the
older generation and the politicized aesthetics of the younger generation of literary
academics, championing a dramatics or theatrics of art—or better: she offers essentially
what her one-time heroine (and now scorned rival) Susan Sontag called for in her
celebrated 1964 essay "Against Interpretation": an erotics of art.
Paglia holds that she has fulfilled the task that Sontag announced but lacked the will
and fortitude to pursue: creating a new aesthetics and a new intellectual breed—body-
centered, flamboyant, manic, outrageous, i.e., the intellectual as Dionysian performer,
a.k.a. the intellectual as Camille Paglia. Favoring a critical approach that centers on
artistic personality, Paglia calls for a seismic shift in our intellectual-cultural values, from
(as she wrote in Sexual Personae) "Hebrew word-worship" to "pagan imagism," from
"the great unseen" to "the glorified thing." But the interaction between her work and life
constitute not only the summons but also the enactment of such a shift: her essays and
lectures—and interviews—perform her exaltation of the theatrical over the textual, the

John Rodden is the author of The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "St.
George" Orwell. His forthcoming book Opposing Selves: Lionel Trilling And The Critics will be
published this fall by Scolar Press. The author is grateful to Beth Macom for her meticulous and insightful
editing of this manuscript.
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY RODDEN

dramatic over the verbal, the cinematic over the linguistic—and ultimately and ironically,
despite her commitment to scholarship, the oral over the written.

II
Nineteen-ninety represents a cultural time line (at least in Camille Paglia's own
mind)—BC and AP: Before Camille and After Paglia. Paglia demarcates her life into the
pre- and the post-1990s: her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from
Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in November 1990 by Yale University Press
(after being rejected by a dozen presses in a decade), catapulted her virtually overnight
from obscurity to fame—and, almost immediately, infamy. With the appearance of two
essay/review/interview collections, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (1992)
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and Vamps and T r a m p s (1994), her notoriety has only increased.

Paglia's first life began, rather conventionally, in a modest, middle-class home. Born in
1947 in upstate New York, she grew up in an Italian household; her mother emigrated to
the US as a child; her late father, a professor of Romance languages at Jesuit-run
LeMoyne College in Syracuse, was the son of Italian immigrants. Paglia attended the
State University of New York at Binghamton (1964—68) and received her Ph.D. from
Yale in 1974, after writing her dissertation under Harold Bloom. She had already begun
teaching at Bennington in 1972, and she continued therefor eight stormy years, before
being asked to leave in 1980. Thereafter she bounced around, going from Wesleyan to
Yale (as a part-time lecturer), before finally landing a position as an assistant professor at
the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts in 1984 (since renamed the University of the
Arts) where she is now in her 11th year of teaching.
Paglia's second life began in 1990—or, more properly, in mid-1991, when Sexual
Personae was reissued as a Vintage paperback. That year she was also finally promoted to
the rank of full professor at the University of the Arts.
Sexual Personae gained respectful reviews from the mainstream press in 1990 and
early 1991, though it received sharp criticism from some academic, especially feminist,
critics. "Myra Breckenridge on a roll," Gore Vidal rhapsodized. "Oswald Spengler
rewritten by Barbara Cartland" and a sop to "patriarchal fantasies," scoffed two feminist
critics, outraged by the book's sweeping revision of Western art history.1 The ensuing
controversy helped propel Sexual Personae to seventh on the New York Times
paperback bestseller list and later gained it a National Book Critics Circle Award
nomination for criticism, considerable achievements for a 700-page tome of academic art
criticism.
But Sexual Personae was not at all academic in the conventional sense of the word.
With a jacket depicting a split face—half Nefertiti, half Emily Dickinson ("Amherst's
Madame de Sade" in Paglia's revisionist characterization), Sexual Personae immedi-
ately generated debate because of its focus on sexuality and sadomasochism (lionizing
"decadents" such as the Marquis de Sade and Gustave Moreau), its assaults on the
orthodoxies of mainstream feminism ("My stress [is] on the truth in sexual stereotypes and
on the biologic basis of sex differences. . ."), and its provocative one-liners ("If civilization
had been left infernale hands, we would still be living in grass huts."). The book's main
thesis is that literary scholars, inhibited in recent decades by the bourgeois, formalist
orthodoxies of modernism, feminism, and liberalism, have overvalued the "reading" of
"texts" ("the moralistic obsessions with language"), thereby neglecting the major roles of
beauty, personality, sexuality, and indeed perversity in art, literature, and history: "[TJhe
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY JANUARY 1996

amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored
or glossed over by most academic critics. " By contrast, Paglia sought to "demonstrate the
unity and continuity of Western culture" by tracing its pagan themes and values from
Egyptian antiquity through the European Renaissance to 19th-century Romanticism.
Paglia thus undertook in Sexual Personae to do nothing less than rewrite the history of
Western art by analyzing a self-constructed taxonomy of sexual symbolic figures—her
"sexual personae"—in the works of canonical writers and artists. Among the two dozen
sexual personae that the book discusses are the beautiful boy, the vampire, the femme
fatale, the Great Mother, the androgyne, the Amazon, the lesbian, the virago, and the
Pythohess.

Ill
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As Paglia's media exposure increased in 1991-92—guest shots on Oprah, stories in

Time, Esquire, and Vanity Fair—Life began to imitate Art, i.e., Paglia's personal
history began to recapitulate the art history she reconstructed in Sexual Personae. What I
have called her "second life" became a running motion picture of persona after persona.
Perhaps her most eye-catching performance was the March 1991 cover for the San
Francisco Examiner, when she posed, whip in hand, before a porn shop near her
Swarthmore apartment: Paglia, the Libertarian Belle of Philadelphia, American aca-
deme's own Madame de Sade.
National disputes about Paglia and her work swelled and erupted again with her second
book, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Critics divided over whether Paglia was an
, original thinker or a media doll, a serious scholar or a publicity seeker exploiting the
(alleged) "backlash" against feminism's successes. Sex, Art, a n d American Culture was
lauded as the work of a fearless freethinker and dismissed as "all raving and name-calling
and braggadocio."2
Anticipating the announced second volume of Sexual Personae, which will address
twentieth-century popular culture (particularly Hollywood movies, TV, sports, and rock
music), Sex, Art, and American Culture featured Paglia's own popcult enthusiasms,
among them Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, and Robert Mapplethorpe. The collection even
included cartoons and a running "media history" of Paglia's press coverage. The most
hotly debated essay was "Rape and the Modern Sex War," a scathing criticism (first
published in January 1991 in NewsdayJ of what she called the "naive" approach to date
rape taken by the feminist Establishment, which, she said, conditions women to think of
themselves as victims rather than promoting female self-reliance. Sex, Art, and Ameri-
can Culture is also noteworthy for its celebrations and attacks on academe, exemplified in
Paglia's glowing appreciation of a former Binghamton teacher (Milton Kessler) and her
condemnation of "politically correct" academic "frauds" such as women's studies programs
and French literary theory.
Even before the publication of her most recent collection of miscellaneous pieces, Vamps
a n d T r a m p s , Paglia had ascended to intellectual celebrity, firmly establishing herself in
print interviews and on talk shows as a leading radical libertarian defender of pornogra-
phy and snuff films, abortion rights, and drug legalization. She also became an even bigger
thorn in the side of what she now terms "the Stalinist P. C. feminist Establishment"—which
ranges from the Ms. magazine "coterie" (Gloria Steinern, Robin Morgan) to the
heterophobic, anti-free-speech "feminazis" (Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin) to
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY RODDEN

the "puritans" and sexually-repressed ideologues (Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi) to the
"whiny," "victim-obsessed," "special-interest" women's studies scholars (Elaine Showalter
et al.). Calling herself one of the "tough-cookie feminists"—among whose personae are
"vamps and tramps," Paglia proclaimed her brand of feminism a throwback to early,
self-reliant, independent-minded feminists such as her own long-time personal heroines:
Simone de Beauvoir, Katharine Hepburn, and Amelia Earhart (on whom, as a teen,
Paglia wrote a book-length manuscript).
Meanwhile, feminist leaders tried to ignore Paglia. "Why should we waste energy on a
publicity-obsessed, intellectually bereft, rather pathetic person?" asked former Ms. editor
Robin Morgan. "We don't give a — what she thinks, " Gloria Steinern declared during a
Q&A session on 60 Minutes. 5
Although Vamps and T r a m p s covered everything from the Clintons to the American
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church and religious right to Joey Buttafuoco, Paglia concentrated her fire upon her
feminist "enemies." The collection was chiefly a no-holds-barred frontal assault on the
feminist "Establishment." The provocative one-liners, while elaborating the themes of the
first two books, were especially targeted at her feminist critics, old and new: "Women are
not in control of their bodies; nature is. " "What feminists call patriarchy is simply
civilization. " "Art and pornography, not politics, show the real truth about sex. " "Modern
middle-class white women cannot bear the thought that their hard-won professional
achievements can be outweighed in an instant by a young hussy flashing a little tits and
ass."

IV
Hurricane Camille is still blowing at gale force in 1995; her reputation shows no signs
of dying down. An established presence on the American cultural scene, there are no
indications that her fifteen minutes of fame are over. Part of the reason is that her
bisexuality and lesbianism, her anti-feminist feminism, her libertarian politics, her
bristling critiques of academe, and her defense of Western civilization and the traditional
literary canon make it difficult to place, let alone pigeonhole her as a neoconservative,
misogynist, pop cultist, etc. etc.
Cultural commentators remain divided: Which is the greater drive in Paglia: the power
to create or the will to destroy? She is the first to speak of her numerous "enemies," i.e., the
careerist "yuppie feminists" terrified of a "street-smart," tough-cookie feminist like herself.
Numerous observers second Paglia's heroic self-image, seeing her noisy assertiveness,
uninhibited vitalism, and lusty thirst for intensity as bluntness, strength, authoritativeness,
gusto, self-confidence, vivacity, charisma, and even nobility of spirit. Others perceive the
same characteristics as swaggering self-importance, contemptuous aggressiveness, over-
heated narcissism, impulsive dilettantism, neurotic mania, and extreme paranoia.
There is nothing subtle or indirect about Camille Paglia: not only was she, as she boasts
in the interview below, born without a "flirtation gene"—but also, one might add, without
a "diplomacy gene." She is not sparing with insults; constantly testing others and herself,
Paglia is clearly an adventurer with more than a touch of megalomania. And yet, it is
precisely that style—explosive, confrontational, sometimes ruthless and abusive—that has
also been the fuel energizing her diverse personae and enabling her remarkable feats of
self-transformation.
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY JANUARY 1996

V
Talking with Camille Paglia—or, rather, mostly listening to an entertainingly baroque
two-and-a-half-hour melodramatic monologue by her—/ came to understand better both
what so infuriates her detractors and infatuates her admirers. A "conversation" with
Paglia is invariably one-sided, involving a good deal of awkward interrupting: her
relentless flow of speech resembles (as she herself recognizes) a projectile that accelerates
until it meets an immovable force. And no matter what the incidental topic, the real topic is
Paglia.
But if you sit back and enjoy the performance, you notice that Paglia is not just
entertaining but throwing off spark after spark of insight, bombarding you with a fusillade
of perceptions. She is Nietzschean intellectual dynamite: her mental fervor is exhilarating
and her audacious, impassioned freethinking is rare—especially in the literary academy
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(as she is the first to remind you).

On first reading her in 1990,1 had felt much of this, and the experience was reinforced
on seeing her funny, sloppy, shotgun, wing-it lecture "thing" at the University of Texas at
Austin in February 1993. During our July 1995 interview, however, a new side of
Camille Paglia emerged. When she does not feel backed to the wall defending herself before
a public audience, she is surprisingly chatty and relaxed, with even her adversarial temper
and love of combat giving way to an endearing egocentricity—befitting her (hilariously
candid) remark in Vamps in T r a m p s : "I'm in love with myself. It's the romance of the
century!"
Anthony Burgess once said ofPaglia's writing style: "Each sentence jabs like a needle."4
Although her trains of thought sometimes switch tracks, with digression piled upon tangent
piled upon parenthetical aside, Paglia's spoken sentences possess the same sharp edges and
battering-ram quality as her writing style. It is an assertive, punching-bag delivery that
recalls her pronouncement in Sexual Personae: "My method is a form of sensationalism. "
Paglia herself considers this to be her popular "elegance, " which, as she defines it in
Sexual Personae, consists in "reduction, simplification, condensation."
And by her own definition, Paglia's public performances do indeed exhibit a manic
elegance.

VI
"Art springs from personality, so it is only to personality that it can be revealed." That
line of Oscar Wilde, proudly cited by Paglia in her Sexual Personae chapter on the
master, could well serve as the theme of her performance art: Greatness in Art and Life
consists in strong personality.5
Or, as Oscar elsewhere characterized his own performance aesthetic: "Nothing succeeds
like excess."
In enacting this view, Paglia the critic as artist has made the relation between text and
•performance a central issue. But because so much of Paglia's work stresses not the
interconnections between text and performance, but rather their complicated tensions and
overdetermined oppositions, the following two-part interview highlights the disruptions
and conflicts associated with Paglia's career as a "performing artist-intellectual," as
exemplified both in general society and in the university classroom.
Of special interest here are Paglia's comments about the "real" Paglia minus the public
personae, about Camille—as distinguished from "Camille," the masked heroine of a
thousand faces. For those familiar with Paglia's corpus, another of the interview's
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY RODDEN

highlights involves how Paglia distinguishes her own intellectual-academic masks from the
cerebral, bourgeois, and/or genteel personae of earlier generations of thinkers and
scholars such as Susan Sontag, Northrop Frye, and Helen Vendler. Paglia s autobiographi-
cal remarks also shed light on some of her aesthetic judgments, e.g., her unorthodox,
provocative claim in Sexual Personae that "Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame (1955) is
the American Alice in Wonderland and in my view more interesting and important than
any 'serious' novel after World War II. "
Part One of the interview focuses on the scope and style of Paglia's own personae,
including her relationship to various performance modes and media (comedy, improvisa-
tion, acting, dance, photography) and her standing in a performance-art tradition
ranging from Socrates and Jesus to Lenny Bruce and Roddy McDowell. Part Two, which
will appear in the next issue of TPQ, features Paglia's pedagogy of performance, both in
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her teaching and public lecturing.

Q: Much of your work not only consists of a critique of the American academy,
but also invents a new style of intellectual life. And a crucial component of that
new style seems to be your distinctive marriage of performance art and academic-
intellectual life.
A: That's right. And I have done this very consciously. I'm a Sixties person, and
ever since my college years [at SUNY Binghamton, 1964-68], it has been part of
my ambition to bring up to date the whole notion of what an intellectual is. Even
though I liked Susan Sontag during my college days, the persona that she and
other intellectuals projected was, in my view, body-dead. She and other leading
intellectuals were simply minds attached by a string to these non-operative
bodies. And I felt that much of the revolution of the Sixties, which has still not
been fully appreciated, is to gain attention for this.
You see, my generation is very physical and very sensory. The 1960s wasn't
just a sexual revolution; it was a sensual revolution. We were interested in
speaking with our bodies and no longer tolerating the traditional Western
cleavage between mind and body.
Q: How did you begin to enact this revolutionary turn toward a different,
performance-oriented, body-aware intellectual in the Sixties?
A: There is no doubt that I came across in graduate school at Yale like this
Bizarre Being from another dimension. It wasn't just my loudness, my flamboy-
ance, and my physical energy—it was also my dress. I affected a lavender look:
suede shoes, vest with a pale blue Tom Jones muscle-sleeve shirt, a stained-glass
ornament around my neck, white eye makeup with blue eye powder, and very
short hair—which was radical back then. I mean it was way beyond what anyone
would dream as to how a serious person should look. My fellow graduate
students were dressed in shades of brown and grey; they affected a shambling
intellectual style.
But what really got me into trouble—and would be discussed today in terms
of performance art—wasn't my dress but rather my pranks. I was put on
probation in college for committing forty major pranks—all of them surreal
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY JANUARY 1996

distortions of the campus environment. And I still ended up becoming the

valedictorian. It was unheard ofthat a valedictorian would wind up on proba-
tion for physical pranks! You'd normally think, "That's what a fraternity boy
would do. That's what the people with C averages do." But I did them, and it
only escalated when I began teaching at Bennington fin 1972]. Every year there
at Bennington, quite literally, I plotted these public modes of performance,
which invariably led to a major scandal.
Q: The fist fight at the college dance [1979] that led to your dismissal?
A: Well, that was one of them, and it occurred after I'd been at Bennington
seven years. But the most famous incident occurred in 1974. Feminism was still
quite new. The college had been all women; it had just gone co-ed three years
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earlier, and these wimpy guys—who couldn't cut it at other schools—were

coming in and taking over the college. They were very obnoxious.
So I plotted to put them in their place: I'd show them up as total wimps. The
culminating incident was that these guys had a night club where they pilloried
everybody on campus, including me. If it were today, I'd say, "These guys have
a right to free speech and I have no business interfering." But I said back then,
"I'll show them." So I went to the public cafeteria and waited for one of these
guys to come along. The humor of it was that I'm five-foot-three, and this guy
was six feet tall, but I attacked him. I attacked him and said: "You're a bully." I
whipped him around by the collar and his glasses flew off. I booted him in the
rear end with my big Frye boots—every feminist wore them back then—and
announced as he flew across the room: "This is in revenge for the night club."
The whole campus went into an uproar. The campus was absolutely split. The
performance side of the college—even the visual arts people—thought it was
wonderful. They said: "What? She kicked a student in the rear end? Hey, that's
great!" But the other side—the book-oriented people—were horrified. So
horrified were these bookworm people that they convened a committee to
review the whole thing. On the next day, feminist students presented me with a
poster: "Award for the Golden Boot." And there's no doubt that the boot had an
effect, because these wimpy guys went into their cubbyholes and never were
heard from again. So it was this spectacular, obnoxious thing that women never
did—just doing something physical like that: kicking somebody in the rear.
So my point is that, from day one, I've been just as I am today. My
enemies—people like Susan Faludi and other Establishment feminists—say:
"Oh, she just does that to get attention!" But my entire life has been a
performance, and the reason that I am famous and known to the general public
has to do with my ability as a performer. I am able to enact my ideas in a way that
is accessible to people outside the academy and to non-readers. The pranks
testify to my conviction that mere brain power is not enough. You have to act it
out, you have to find the physical correlate of the idea, you have to perform it in
some way. And that is a different kind of communication from that of the
book-oriented people: it is a language of the body. The language of perfor-
mance and of the body is older than words and logic.
Q: So although you have only stepped onto the public stage in the last five years,
since the paperback success of Sexual Personae [1991], you have been "honing
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY RODDEN

your act" for decades. And in that light, it seems especially fitting that you
should be affiliated with the University of the Arts, which used to be called the
Philadelphia College of Performing Arts.
A: Right. This is the college that hired me in 1984, when I was unhirable. It was
the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, and it merged with the Philadel-
phia School of Art, which taught the visual arts.
The setting is perfect for me as a performer. Here in downtown Philadelphia,
right on Broad Street, things are constantly happening as I teach. There's a fire
engine going by or explosions going off—all kinds of things. And so my attitude
is: work it all in. I want to keep the students alert. Whatever it might be—an
alarm goes off, a chair tips over—I work it in. I have this capacity for absolutely
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instantaneous response: my reflexes as a performer are fabulous.

So I work every single distraction into the seamless whole of my teaching: it's
all part of the classroom performance.
Q: And you respond in a similarly spontaneous way during your lectures,
adapting your remarks to the mood and temper of the audience.
A: Right. And this is what has devastated my opponents when I go out on the
road. Because I make use not only of the immediate situation but of the
performance of other great performers: their performances are also part of my
repertoire.
For instance, when I spoke at Brown [in 1992], people were yelling, I mean
just yelling and yelling, from the second row. They kept on hissing, trying to
disrupt the event and shout me down even before the talk began. But I was able
to turn the tables on them. I pointed down to them—and I knew exactly where I
was getting this from: it was from the movie Cleopatra, when Roddy McDowell as
Caesar comes out from the Senate and looks down on the crowd. Holding a
spear of war, he asks the unruly crowd, "Where is Egypt?" And they say,
pointing toward the direction: "This way!" And he replies, "No, here is Egypt.
Down here." And then he throws the spear and kills a guy right down there.
And that's what I did. Drawing from all the movie lore in my head, I just
announced to the hundreds of people in Brown's auditorium, as I pointed to the
disrupters in the second row: "Here! Here are the forces that want to suppress
free speech in our culture! Here they are! Look at them now!"
The mouths of these people just fell open. Because they thought of themselves
as such liberals and radicals—and I had just totally turned the tables on them.
And they were completely squelched, the whole row of them. They were
paralyzed and squelched! And they didn't utter one single syllable for the rest of
the evening.
Q: And you really had Roddy McDowell in mind when you threw that spear into
the second row ofthat Brown audience?
A: Absolutely. I have the ability to absorb so many performances and to
transform them into my own. I assimilate gestures and lines of dialogue from all
these fabulous movies I've seen: the great movies of the past are part of me.
I'll give you another example that you might remember from my visit to [the
University of] Texas. Before the lecture began, the crowd was restless. I was
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TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY JANUARY 1996

wearing my eighties video outfit with the short skirt and high heels a la
Madonna, and I just peeked out and put my finger out, like "No, no, no!" And
they all quieted down. And in that moment, I had ceased being an academic and
passed into something else.
And that is another reason why I'm so popular, and why I'm so good when I
go on TV. Ordinary people identify with me. Just the other day, I was in the
mall, and I had sunglasses on. And I was immediately stopped by an absolutely
ordinary Italian couple. They were in their late sixties, neither of them intellec-
tuals or academics. And they said, "Oh, Camille Paglia, we love you on TV!"
There is no intellectual in history who has ever had my level of face recogni-
tion. It's really remarkable, and it has to do with my own working-class
background. My father did become a college teacher, but my grandfather was a
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factory worker. He kept his Italian outlook, and I'm a throwback to his
generation: the flamboyant, theatrical Italian style. As Luigi Barzini notes in The
Italians, theatricality is central to Italian expression: that's why we invented
grand opera. It goes all the way back to ancient Rome: the processions and the
ritualism of clan and state life.
Anyway, I get stopped on the street by ordinary people all the time. One of the
most moving examples was my trip to Harvard last year. I was going to speak at
the Kennedy School of Government and I hadn't been to Boston in a year. And I
come out of the airport, wearing a trench coat. And the elderly man who
summons the taxis says to me, "Welcome back to Boston, Miss Paglia!"
You see, working people recognize me. Not only did he recognize me—he
even knew how long I'd been gone from Boston. This happens to me all the
time, and the reason is that I'm able to communicate to ordinary people: I'm a
performer able to reduce complex ideas to simple gestures.
Q: And that ability also informs your teaching style, which exemplifies pedagogy
as a popular art.
A: Yes. I'm very good at survey courses, which most teachers abhor. And I'm
good at taking something complex and finding the inner seams in it. I like to
show students the few, simple seams central to a work. I'm not interested in just
speaking to English majors at Harvard University. And that's what separates me
from the people who went to graduate school with me and have had the great
academic careers at places like Princeton and Harvard. They are actually
disadvantaged because of their success at getting the big job offers, since most of
their entire clientele has consisted of prep-school products, or at least people
whose skills are fairly well-developed.
But I've dealt all my career with students who don't want to be in the
classroom, or who are not English majors but rather auto mechanics and so on.
So I've been able to hone my skill of appealing to a mixed audience. That's a big
part of my talent as a performer. Because every crowd is mixed; it's not a coterie.
You don't have only people in my classes who know a Tennessee Williams play
intimately—instead you have some who have studied the play, some who have
seen it fifty times, and some who have never seen it or even heard of Tennessee
Williams. So my task becomes this: How to introduce a play to people who need
an introduction and how to satisfy the sophisticates and give them something
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new, fresh, subtle, and thoughtful. A performer has to know how to reach
people.
Q: How much contact do you have with recognized, professional performance
artists?
A: The word-centered literary Establishment in New York and academe hate
me, but most performers love me. To them, I seem normal, because I have the
attitude of somebody in rock—a part of the culture that never touches someone
like [Harvard English professor] Helen Vendler. I seem like a maniac to literary
people like her, really a monster from hell. I identify with the performing side of
the culture as opposed to the literary side.
I have a very special rapport with dancers. They love me at the University of
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the Arts. When I arrived here in 1984, the dancers all sat clustered in the back
whenever they took the required Humanities courses. But from the moment I
arrived, the dancers moved forward and now occupy the front rows of the
classroom—because I act out everything. And that's just one group of artists.
Q: What are the other groups?
A: Some of my first admirers were sculptors, painters, and actors. I have an
enormous following among actors, including famous actors. And people in the
fashion world, like Lauren Hutton. And David Bowie. And Raquel Welch. There
is a whole series of people who are performers and have a vibe with my work and
understand exactly what I'm doing.
Q: Including photographers.
A: Right. The thing between me and photographers is incredible. We have the
same vision of things, because of my interest in the late Swinging Sixties London
mod. That was the era of [fashion photographer Richard] Avedon doing those
fabulous fashion photographs. And feminism wasn't opposed to fashion at that
time.
My first major photoshoot was when New York Magazine put me on its cover. It
was March 1991, and they sent Harry Benson, a British photographer who did
the Beatles and so on. And it was already in my head that if I'm posing for a
photograph, I'm going to enact my ideas via a self-portrait. So I said, "Let me
pose with my swords." And so that's how we ended up with that full-page
picture: I'm in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, exactly where Rocky
stood, where [Sylvester] Stallone runs up the stairs. He's jogging and jogging
and turns around, and his upraised arms are in a gesture of triumph. And I'm
standing there with this sword, defending the classics. I'm posing in an au
courant way, this kind of Amazon, dykie-dykie short blue hair look. It's a pose of
the moment, and yet I'm defending the classics.
And that totally deranged my opponents. They threw garbage at me of every
kind: she's conservative, she's misogynist, she's homophobic. But all their words
bounced off.
Q: The different poses in your photoshoots have been occasions for experiment-
ing with your persona of the intellectual as performer.
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A: Absolutely. Every time photographers have come to shoot me, I've thought of
something else that's great. For the San Francisco Examiner, I posed in a short
purple miniskirt with chains and whips in front of a porn store a few blocks from
my university, looking kind of crazed. And for People magazine, I posed like a
scene out of West Side Story, in the train tunnel at Swarthmore College. I'm
coming at the camera with this knife, and I was trying to say: "This is my posture
of attack! I identify with the street!" That's my street-smart feminism. I don't
want to be a decorous, genteel, bourgeois professor in the Ivy League. I'm a
throwback to something pre-modern.
When the Vanity Fair story came in 1992, I said, "I've done the whole
Amazon-dyke thing. Now I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to do
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something completely vampy, trashy, flashy. I've never shown my bosom at all,
but now I'm going trashy."
My publisher was horrified! Horrified! She said, "What?! You're posing
what?!! This is a major profile in Vanity Fair!" But I had a vision in my head:
posing with my bodyguards, two black guys, one is looking one way and the
other is looking the other way and I'm in the middle. My arms are around them,
and I'm leaning down very vampy and I'm showing my cleavage. And my editor
said, "Are you crazy?!!" And I said, "No, I'm veering away from the dykie thing.
It's part of my ideas of woman as a vamp and tramp"—and that, of course,
became the title of my next book [Vamps and Tramps].
Well, we did it, and wham!—it worked so well, we didn't even shoot anything
else. As soon as the photographer got to Vanity Fair, they were saying, "These
are fabulous!" So my publisher was mollified. And nobody ever tried to tell me
anything again.
Just like the cover for Vamps and Tramps. I had it in my head: I'm going to do it
in a Diana Rigg-guerrilla Avengers mode. I'm going to get a military jacket, I'm
going to be wearing the knife, not holding it. Lauren Hutton's boyfriend, Luca
Bubini, the Italian book photographer, shot the cover as a gift to me. It
telegraphs what I stand for. Part of its power comes from Italian Catholicism; it
derives from the statues in church that I saw when I was very young. Those
statues had such an impact on me: Saint Lucy, holding out her eyeballs on a
platter. Or an archangel holding his sword raised, as he tramples a devil. Or
Saint Sebastian, standing there with arrows sticking out of his body.
This condensed iconic way of using the body is both choreographic and
sculptural. And it's part of Italian culture stretching back to antiquity. That's the
difference between me and people from the Protestant tradition. They had no
images, no stained-glass windows, whereas every single thing in Italian Catholi-
cism has some symbol or characteristic posture. There's one of the evangelists,
maybe Mark, with the lion. Another one has a sword. Saint Lawrence gets fried
on a grill.
And that symbolism is part of how my mind works. I've gone out of my way to
mark a difference between me and the Susan Sontag era and all those intellectu-
als who have come before me. Susan Sontag would be afraid to make a fool of
herself. You can't imagine Susan Sontag posing with a sword or something. But
part of my success has to do with my spirit of mischief, my willingness to put
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myself out there and do these crazy kind of childlike things. It's a spirit of play,
spontaneity, enjoyment. For me, creativity and play are utterly intertwined.
Q: Are there any performance artists whom you especially admire? Or who have
influenced your thinking about all this?
A: No contemporary person—I'm one of the performance artists of contempo-
rary life. My influences are from the movies, the great Hollywood era. I've taken
body language and even vocal things from Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn
and Roz Russell. Weird things I've picked up.
But I do study comedians: I feel stand-up comedy is where the culture is at
any given moment. Comedians are chameleon-like. They are so absorbent.
They change as the culture changes. They just go out into the audience alone
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with a mike and just deal with that audience. And that's what I really do too.
The serious novel has been dead since World War II—everything has gone
into theatre: into movies, soap operas, rock' n'roll, pop culture, and now
performance art. When I'm on stage, I'm borrowing from Joan Rivers, Joey
Mahar, [Mike] Nichols and [Elaine] May. And Ellen DeGeneres—when she was
good. Now she's very bland, she's gone homogenized mainstream.
Q: What do you think of comedians such as Sandra Bernhardt and Holly
Hughes?
A: Oh, Holly Hughes! I have no interest in seeing Holly Hughes! Every word
that comes out of that woman's mouth is P.C. garbage. I've never even seen a
single performance by her. Every word I see in print from her is just contempt-
ible and utterly passe—twenty years out of date. And Karen Finlay too! Ugh!
But Sandra Bernhard, yes. She and I are definitely on the same wave length.
She's much more sardonic than I am, but we've become friendly.
I'm actually closest to Joan Rivers. I've been called the Joan Rivers of
academe. I'm manic like her—which Bernhard is not. Bernhard has a cynical
edge and is vampy in her persona. Whereas I'm more like Joan Rivers, saying,
"Oh my God, I can't get a date! Oh my love life! Da da-da da-da da-da."
But just like with the movies, I have great admiration for comedians of the
past. Today there are a lot of canned jokes in comedy, but in the old days there
was much more improv. I'm coming out of Lenny Bruce, really. He's a big
influence on me.
I loved the way Lenny Bruce was influenced by African-American rhythms,
jazz, how he used syncopation and dynamics. He would work the audience, go
for humor and then for something serious, the way he kept changing his tones.
And that has been part of my attitude when I give a lecture. People are coming
to see me, coming to see the personality. When Northrop Frye used to lecture in
the late sixties, when he was so famous, I didn't want to hear him read. I wanted
to hear what he had for breakfast and what happened on the plane.
So my attitude is: Even if it turns out chaotic, it's better for the audience and
for the performance if there's chaos in your delivery, chaos in your overall
message, rambling around, rather than to oppress people in their bodies by
forcing them to listen to something that's meant for the eye and not the ear. So
I've been determined to create a new kind of professor on the road. The whole
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thing is improv, and if it's chaos, so be it. Because people are coming to see me,
coming to see the personality. They want to see a great performance.
Q: What makes a "great" performance?
A: An almost supernatural level of energy. The energy expenditure energizes
the audience. I can go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. And people
stay because I'm doing such a mix of things: there is a great mix of modes and
tones in what I do; I'm able to unify the whole audience. And I do the same thing
in my writing. You can feel the pulsating energy.
My Italian culture has given me this. I dedicated Sexual Personae to my
grandmother, my mother's mother. What a performer she was! She was unbe-
lievable! The power of gesture, the vocal range she had! She had an enormous
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voice—my own voice is loud, abrasive, and cutting—and she was so flamboyant.
I loved her working-class energy and her assertive body language. I don't
understand the Italian language, because my grandparents came from different
regions of Italy and they spoke a provincial dialect. It's very difficult to
understand, but I grasped what was going on beyond the words. Because the
body language and facial expressions acted it all out.
And that's also why I get along great with African-American, working-class
students. Because I act everything out, I seem perfectly normal to them. Black
women have my kind of theatrical style, and they recognize the affinities. Much
of this has to do with nature. People who come from the country, people with
agricultural roots are louder, because you're yelling over the noise, you're
outside and you're yelling. You're yelling in the fields, in the street, and so on.
And so I'm constantly talking about the transition that people have to make
from working-class culture into middle-class culture. A middle-class culture is
office-based and you have to cut off half of your personality to fit into an office.
You can't be loud. If you're loud, you interfere with everyone else's work. You
can't make my kind of boisterous gestures, because you're sitting in a little
confined space. So I'm not good at that. I'm not good at committee meetings.
I'm not good at any kind of small thing at all. I feel caged.
Q: And so the traditional, conservative professional style of the academic has felt
very confining to you.
A: Right. I've not done well in academe, because you need to have buttocks like
rocks to sit there for hours and hours with this nattering little chaired fellow
spouting gibberish. I'm no good at sitting still for that. But put me in front of a
crowd of 5,000 people and I can communicate with them. The bigger the crowd,
the more at home I feel.
So my performance abilities have helped and hindered me. They held me
back in my academic career, because middle-class culture is the last place you
should be performing in; but as soon as I got [Sexual Personae] published, they
helped make me famous.
By the way, this is why a lot of working-class African-Americans have trouble
making it in the office world—for the same reason I've had trouble. What
people call racial incidents on campus or in the workplace are actually class
incidents. African Americans are not encountering racial bias. They're meeting
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the same kind of ethnic bias that I've encountered as an Italian who refused to
assimilate. My parents assimilated. They are of the generation of the 1950s that
wanted to assimilate—they became very well-mannered. People haven't be-
lieved it when they've met them. They say, "How could Camille Paglia be
produced by these parents?!" It's because I'm a throwback to the theatricality of
the old style. Any culture that lives on the land has an incredible level of strong
gesture and voice, and also makes use of wonderful curses! And cursing is part of
performance art everywhere from Ireland to Africa. Long, flamboyant cursing.
In tribal cultures, you can be aggressive and funny and gaudy and robust. It's
salty language, like sailor's humor. It's barnyard language. When you get to
Gentile bourgeois culture, you are supposed to sanitize your language. That's
why we have all these sexual harassment codes now. Heaven forbid that you
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should tell a dirty joke now!

But rural women are very earthy, and I'm trying to bring that into intellectual
life. And that's why people are always surprised to see me. It's like, "Ugh! Gosh!
That's not like an intellectual at all!" People say to me, "Listen, nobody is going to
take you seriously if you act like that!" I've heard that a million times. My
enemies are always saying: "Nobody takes her seriously anyway." So I go out of
my way to act "unserious," because part of the Sixties' vision is to explode the very
idea of high seriousness. To explode it, and become more like the Zen masters
who are so physical in their teaching techniques. They'll slap students, they'll
kick students, they'll pick up a stool and throw it to show that truth is something
that is not in words, truth is something that is more in your relation to the
physical environment. Or the Hindu sages. They are always laughing. Laugh-
ing, giggling. And that's the way that Hindu monks are too. They are very
childlike. It's hilarious. They laugh, they play in the mud.
And so I've gone out of my way again and again to explode the old idea of the
intellectual: the idea that the head and abstractions are greater than the physical
world. I don't believe they are. I believe that truth is in the physical world. In
fact, I've talked about Jesus as a performance artist.
Q: Christ as a performance artist?
A: I don't believe Jesus was God. But he was one of the great performance
artists. To me, one of the best measures of a performance artist is the artist's
ability, whenever the audience throws something at you, to knock it back, to
knock it out of the park. And Jesus had that ability. His greatest moment was
when he's asked, "Should we Jews pay taxes to Rome?" And he seems to be
caught, and you can feel the crowd saying, "Whoa!" Because if he says, "Don't
pay taxes," he's going to be arrested by the Romans. But if he says, "Pay your
taxes," he seems to be selling out Jewish culture. And so he says, "Show me the
coin of the realm." And they show him the coin. And he asks, "Whose image is
on it?" And they say, "Caesar's." And he replies: "Then render unto Caesar the
things that are his and render under God the things that are God's."
I mean unbelievable! When you're in front of a hostile crowd like that!
Enemies are in the audience, they're trying to bring you down and they trap you
with this trick question, and you handle it. That is amazing.
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I think Jesus was really a Jewish comedian. He was a forerunner to Lenny

Bruce. So was Socrates, in a different way. Great teachers, both of them. My
God! All the great masters have been performance artists.
Q: There's another provocative group of performers with whom you've identi-
fied yourself, partly because of your comic affinities with them. You wrote in
Vamps and Tramps: "The raging egomania and volatile comic personae of Rush
Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and Ross Perot, tending toward the loopy, has
helped restore free speech in America." And, of course, you're the only aca-
demic among them.
A: And the only woman.
Q: Right. And your identification with that trio has contributed to the charges
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that you are a neo-conservative.

A: Well, I was charged with neo-conservatism long before that statement. I'm a
libertarian saying that the liberal tradition is dead as a doornail. The other three
are conservatives who hate the liberal agenda.
But my point is that we all burst on the scene and became famous at the same
moment. Each of us was a phenomenon, each of us responded to a vacuum in
the culture. We challenged what Dan Quayle rightly called the cultural elite of
the northeastern Establishment. Really, there was a lock on: you couldn't get
any kind of opposing view on feminism, sexual harassment, date rape, anything.
Free speech? Right!
But all of a sudden, these uncontrollable forces burst on the scene. We were
outsiders who just spoke out. History will show that, during the fifteen years
preceding our arrival on the scene, things had gotten very closed down in
America—very homogenized, very boring. Academe had gotten disgustingly
frozen over with French theory and women's studies rhetoric. If you tried to
critique it, you were condemned as a male chauvinist pig or a neo-conservative
or whatever.
The politics and the appeal of the four of us are somewhat different, but we're
all funny in an earthy way. We're all egomaniacs, yes, monologuing all the time.
Rush Limbaugh speaks for millions of people, millions of mainstream people in
this country. So I take his views seriously, even when they don't agree with mine.
And he's a comedian! On his TV show, he'll take Cheese Twists and put them in
his ears. He's a comedian and a performance artist. People think it's hate radio.
That's not it at all. He's funny.
Rush Limbaugh saw the affinity with me right away. Long before he became
the liberals' big bugaboo—a bad dream of the liberal Establishment—he al-
ready had a large audience, but he wasn't getting national publicity—I heard
about him from my Uncle Albert and his family in upstate New York in February
1990, when Sexual Personae came out. They said, "This is the person who
mentions your name on radio." They thought his name was Ross Limbo—L-I-
M-B-O! I said, "Who is Ross Limbo?" He was quoting the parts about feminism
from the book. He was using the word "feminazi"—and the feminists were
saying, "Oh, he is so evil!"—and all of a sudden here I was, this feminist who
herself felt oppressed by feminazis!
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Howard Stern has a younger crowd. I love the way he goes against every kind
of PC taboo and does all kinds of vulgar things! I support the Howard Stern
enterprise, which is to satirize, in Mad Magazine style, every single important
figure. Only Howard Stern could have satirized Oprah Winfrey and Michael
Jackson, when Oprah went to NeverNever Land and did that whole unctuous
hour with him—he used to be a genius but now he's a freak—that whole hour
where he has the room for all the crippled kids to come and watch movies. Only
Howard Stern would mock that the next morning. When I heard Howard Stern
and Robin Quivers parodying Oprah and Michael Jackson, I thought: "You
guys are our truthtellers. That's what we need." Because there was a bubble that
needed to be popped. Who else would have had the audacity to satirize two
black figures like Oprah and Michael Jackson?! And, of course, Oprah was later
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horrified when the molestation charges [against Jackson] came out. So when he
came back recently, he had Diane Sawyer cover him rather than Oprah. The
point is: Howard Stern saw it first, he cut through all the humanitarian,
philanthropic poses of Michael Jackson: "Oh, yes, I like to have all the little
children in the wheelchairs, all the little boy children, looking at my movies."
Now Ross Perot, I believe, is a fruitcake. But he tapped into the anti-
Washington mood and now all of politics is anti-Washington. Newt Gingrich is
running essentially using Ross Perot's analysis.
And so I think there's a need for unguided missiles, which is what the four of
us are. We're crackpots with very opinionated views, with cracker-barrel humor
who shock you. We all use comedy and satire to make our anti-Establishment
points.
Oh, wait! I completely forgot to tell you about another big influence on me as
a performer: the Yippies. Abbie Hoffman going to the New York Stock Ex-
change visitors' gallery and throwing down dollar bills: a classic moment of
sixties guerrilla theatre. Invading those hallowed halls and doing something
completely outrageous and creating total disorder! And inspiring people to
stand up and resist. That's what I do too.
Q: So you're a "Yippie feminist"? Attacking the yuppie feminists?
A: Yes! When I come to a new campus, I name names. At Harvard, Johns
Hopkins, and so on—I expose the charlatans and name names. That's why I'm
such a powerful weapon when I come to a new campus. Because I expose the
fraud being practiced on the students, who are being forced to read Lacan,
Derrida, Foucault, and these minor women critics, such as Jane Gallup, Eve
Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson, [Sandra] Gilbert and [Susan] Gubar, Elaine Sho-
walter: the goddesses of feminism and women's studies departments. Even
Stephen Greenblatt—I've even made some inroads into Greenblatt's reputa-
tion—another god.
And my enemies—the people who call themselves progressives, who are so
used to taking positions against "conservatives"—these progressives are at a
total loss! I just destroy all of their normal ideology because I don't fit their
pattern of a conservative. Of course, anybody who calls me a conservative—after
encountering my positions, in print, on man-boy love, prostitution, legalization
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of drugs, and so on—is an idiot. But still they say, "Oh, she's gained her fame
because society rewards any woman who attacks other women!" [Susan] Faludi
also likes to say that. But these women are hypocrites—I wrote a major book
from Yale University Press [Sexual Personae], probably by now the best-selling
book of literary criticism in history, and these women's studies people refused to
deal with its ideas.
But they dug a hole for themselves, because I wouldn't have been so aggres-
sive later in naming names if I hadn't been defamed and ignored when my book
appeared [in November 1990]. Their inability to deal with my ideas shows that
they're hypocrites just interested in cronyism, not intellectuals doing original
thinking. They followed a policy of ignoring me, because it had worked with
everybody else who had criticized them. And so I had a great period in the early
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nineties when my ideas achieved huge power, because there were no counter-
arguments from them. The feminist Establishment could dismiss men who
criticized them, "You're just a male chauvinist pig"—but they found they
couldn't do it with me. And by the time that they realized they had to deal with
me, it was too late. And so now Ms. magazine, after ignoring me for five years,
finally mentions me—with a full-scale attack in its May [1995] issue! And the
Stalinist [Susan] Faludi lumps me with Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers
and the new faux feminists—a blistering attack five years too late! But after my
three national bestsellers in four years, they can't defame me as neoconservative,
homophobic, misogynist—it doesn't work, it just looks silly. I was a feminist
before Gloria Steinern! I was the only openly gay person at Yale before
Stonewall! I was a flaming, militant feminist when I arrived at Bennington in
1972. I'm one of the major, pioneering feminist figures of our time! My entire
life is an exemplum of the new woman of the 20th century—Gloria Steinern is
going to have egg on her face in history! She hasn't written any books that are
going to last! I'm a performer playing to the audience of the next century—
because I was so unsuccessful [in academe] for so many years, I've learned to
play to history. Italians plan their funerals, Italians think in terms of posterity!
I'm going to have the last laugh, and these women who are my enemies—these
little pedestrian nerds—are going to look like idiots!
Q: It doesn't seem to me, especially given your current level of national
recognition, that you're waiting for posterity!
A: Well, I'm saying that this will be my final revenge: People are going to look
back and say, "Who the hell were Elaine Showalter and Gilbard and Goobert?"
Q: Let me turn to a different issue. You once described yourself as "a woman
with the soul of a gay man impersonating a woman." Given that impersonation
is a key aspect of most performance, could you discuss yourself as an imperson-
ator?
A: Yes. As a child, I had what I call a massive gender dysfunction. Long before I
wondered whether I was gay or straight, I wasn't sure whether I was a boy or a
girl. I felt that I was more like a boy. Thank God, I never knew about sex
changes—even though Christine Jorgenson had a sex change in the early
1950s, I fortunately never knew about it. If I had known, I would have been
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»
obsessed with the idea of getting a sex change. After my first Halloween, when I
was Alice in Wonderland—in honor of my favorite book—all of my Halloween
personae were male. I was the toreador from Carmen, I was a Roman soldier, I was
Hamlet, I was Napoleon. I mean, here I am, an eight-year-old girl, and you see
an old photograph of me in costume, and it's like you're seeing my deepest, most
repressed self—you're seeing my Napoleon complex. You're seeing my flamboy-
ant, assertive, heroic, male side that was all repressed for young girls in the
Fifties. And so essentially I'm living out all that now.
The one exception in high school—my sole female persona—was Cleopatra,
because I adored the Elizabeth Taylor movie that had just come out. I loved
Elizabeth Taylor, even though I hate her now. Part of the reason that I didn't
identify with female personae was that I hated female clothing. It was all cut for
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Anglo-Saxon bodies, which are much longer and thinner. I'm blocky and prefer
French or Italian clothing. I was always uncomfortable in my clothing and hated
the girdles and stockings and hats and gloves. I hated the whole thing. And so
that's also why I feel like a female impersonator—I just felt so uncomfortable in
female clothing!
So: I've always had this sense of not really being a woman. That's why I call my
feminism "drag-queen feminism." When I put on women's clothes, I feel I'm
really just "putting them on": I'm a man in drag. I don't really feel even male,
though. I feel like I'm something in between. In the Seventies, I didn't even own
a dress or skirt. I boasted I'd never own them again, because they were badges of
servitude, and so on. But after Joan Collins on Dynasty and Donna Mills on Knots
Landing in the eighties, I recovered and, when I began going on the road five
years ago, I began dressing in women's suits in a very grande dame way. As I
became more famous, I fiddled with more theatrical clothing choices, and I
gradually developed this sense of becoming a diva. When I went on the road last
year [1994], I had this spectacular Donna Karan tuxedo suit that I wore with
high heels. I'd come on stage and people would say, "Yes! That's the way Camille
Paglia should fucking look!"
The whole point here is that I realized early on that people were coming to see
me. I'm always very self-conscious, and I often say that the performer "Camille
Paglia" is the diva. And that's a completely separate entity from me. "Camille
Paglia" is more female than the real Camille Paglia.
Q: Do you find yourself consciously and deliberately switching from Camille to
"Camille"?
A: Absolutely. When I go on the road, I put on my pants, my trenchcoat, I go up
in the plane and I come into a new city as if I'm on a military fighter plane, as if
I'm a Scud coming in over the horizon. And then I tramp into town. And then I
transform myself into the diva that they're going to see who can deal with these
thousands of people. And I do transform myself—makeup and the works. I
become a drag queen like my friend Glennda Orgasm.
And I've become very aware of how my face changes. To communicate to the
back rows, you must change your face, as I've also learned from posing for
pictures. I used to say to my friends after I'd come off stage and see a photo,
"This is a great picture of me! How come I don't look this good when I'm posing
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•
for pictures?" I began to realize that, if you're a good performer, you simplify
your face. You open your face and your eyes out. The little facial inflections that
work in the classroom or in a conversation don't work with a crowd. And so you
reduce and simplify your style. Same thing with the camera: when it comes at
you, flashing, you can open your face out.
Q: And "fiddling" with clothing choices is also an important form of stylistic
experiment related to the academic personae that you've tried on.
A: I've been trying to recover the message of the Sixties: Energy! Intellectual life
must have it too. But it's all been lost. Susan Sontag made great clothing choices
when she was younger. She was very serious, but she looked fabulous. When I
went to see her at Dartmouth in the early '70s, she was wearing these sort of
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hip-hugger pants and boots with heels and very close-fitting turtleneck sweaters
and a big wide belt at the hips. She looked really great, even though she wasn't
that far from the tradition of being an intellectual—she looked like a bohemian
intellectual. Germaine Gréer looked fabulous too. Later she became preachy
and moralistic, but in the early seventies she affected a rich hippie look.
What happened to that? Things all became boring. Now the academics who
go on the road and claim to be doing performance art are just doing bullshit. It's
all canned. They do their act, they just go on the road with this act. I believe that
every single time you go out to give a lecture, it should be fresh.
Although there are a few basic things I want to stress each time, all I carry is a
little slip of paper that has my major themes for the evening written on it. I
glance at it toward the end of the lecture to make sure I've hit them, but
otherwise I go out and really play off that audience. I try to feel out the crowd.
Performers always say a crowd is dead or alive or great or whatever. I see
whether they know a lot about me or whether it's a general interest crowd.
Within minutes, I know what kind of crowd it is and what will work.
Q: Improv is central to your style.
A: The reason I'm known for my appearances is that I've honed my improv
skills. Nobody who invites me to campus knows what will happen. I always say,
"We don't know what will happen. Be prepared! I'm warning you!" Sometimes I
have to yell and yell and yell—like I did against the disrupters at Brown.
But my improv skills save me. It's very easy for protesters to disrupt speakers
who come with a prepared text to read. The speaker gets totally thrown offand
can't continue. But what's so disarming about me is that, whatever happens, I
work it into the lecture. I do it as a teacher and I do it in my lectures.
Q: This distinction between your personae and the real—or "real"—you: Is it
long-standing or has it arisen only in the last five years?
A: The real Camille Paglia is just a sort of tomboy. A dowdy tomboy. And that's
why I love the movie and book Auntie Marne. It's the only postwar novel I take
seriously. I've loved it for thirty years. I'm really Agnes Gooch, the unglamorous
secretary. But I have this other, Auntie Maine side: a flamboyant side that the
guys like. And that's the part that you see at the lecture podium. I become
Auntie Marae and then I come offand go back to being Agnes Gooch. I go back
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to my hotel room, take it all off, and then leave town. And so I'm not just an
impersonator, but really a female impersonator.
And all this is why I also think women have enormous power, and why the
feminist Establishment is so wrong to paint women as victims. Drag queens
become drag queens because they know that women are far more powerful and
interesting and the center of attention than men are. Ask any drag queen! That's
why I have such great rapport with drag queens—because they understand me.
When they're not drag queens, they're just these ordinary guys. Nobody looks at
them twice on the street. They gain power and charisma when they put on
female drag.
Q: But the diva just is one of the intellectual-academic personae of "Camille."
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What are the others? And how do they relate to Camille—the real you? Are
there any personae that you've experimented with and felt uncomfortable about
or have had to discard?
A: I was experimenting with a vampy persona for a while, like when I posed for
Vanity Fair. But that's not the real me. No way. I have no flirtation abilities
whatsoever! I was born without a flirtation gene! That's why my sex life was such
a disaster for so many decades, because I was totally unable to flirt. I just show
everything. I don't have that standing back thing, lifting the eyebrows a little bit,
that mysterious, suggestive thing. And so the vampy thing was very interesting
to me because it's the last thing I really am. Now, since I've had a love life for the
last two years with [29-year-old artist-curator] Alison Maddex, I've become
aware that my personality has drifted back toward the more male, androgynous
things, even though I'm wearing high heels with my tuxedo.
So I'm no longer flirting with the audience, now that I've settled into a
relationship. It used to be that, in the middle of all these nasty questions, some
guy would stand up in the middle of the audience and say, "First of all, I want to
say that you've got great legs." And that really takes the audience—all these
people savaging me, and a fan defending me with a personal remark like that.
And when I hear that, I step out from behind the podium and do a little
Madonna dance—something you can't imagine Susan Sontag doing—and then
go right back to being a battering ram. But I don't do all that now, because I'm
in a stable relationship and am not advertising my availability. Before, I was
looking for a man, woman, anything—with no success, zero, zilch.
So I've snapped back like a rubber band to my Amazon androgynous persona.
I'm simply being my dyke tomboy self again.
Q: And your prankster self too. And incorporating this range of intellectual
personae is a central part of your attempt to project a new, different, populist
image of the intellectual.
A: Yes. As my mentor Harold Bloom liked to say: "Teaching is a branch of show
business." A great teacher is always something of a performer.
And as all the cartoons done about me demonstrate, I've become part of pop
culture. By the 1980s, there was a cultural vacuum for a woman intellectual like
me. I'd never read Ayn Rand, but people began telling me that I'm the Ayn
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Rand of the Nineties. And it's really true. Because I say to people, "Think for
yourself."
I'm a symbol, I'm a free spirit that roams around and causes trouble, is rude,
disturbs, and tells the truth. Reveals all the dirty secrets of each campus. Names
names and then flies out of town, letting everyone fight it out with each other.
NOTES
1
Vidal is quoted in Francesca Stanfill, "Woman Warrior: Sexual Philosopher Camille Paglia Jousts with the
Politically Correct," New York Magazine, Vol. 24, no. 9 (March 4, 1991), p. 29. Elizabeth Wilson, "Sex and
Destiny," New Statesman & Society, Vol. 3, no. 94 (March 30, 1990), p. 32. Anne Williams, Review of Sexual
Personae, Georgia Review, Vol. XLIV, no. 3 (Fall 1990), p. 530.
2
Laura Shapiro, "An Intellectual Amazon," Newsweek, 21 September 1992, p. 82.
3
Quoted in Cheryl Lavin, "Camille Paglia," Chicago Tribune, 8 December 1994, p. 1.
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4
Quoted in Stanfill, p. 24.
5
On this theme in Paglia's work, see Mark Edmundson, "Art and Eros," The Nation, Vol. 250, no. 25 (June 25,
1990), p. 898.