Scholars and Scandals
Professor Paglia is in the news again. This time, some of the students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, her home institution where she has been teaching for over three decades, launched a petition demanding she “should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color.”
Here is my review of her latest book Provocations (Pantheon, 2018), in which I tried to contextualize Paglia’s recent writings on sex, gender, art, education and the #MeToo within the last three decades of her scholarship, as well as her writing for the wider public. I think that the irony of what is happening right now is that the passage of time had proven Camille Paglia to be right on many accounts. She is certainly a provocateur, or provocatrice, as the case may be, but in my view she is hardly a controversial thinker.
