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Gave up on reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae
| Consuela | 03/30/26 |
Poast new message in this thread
Date: March 30th, 2026 5:34 PM Author: Consuela After reading Nietzsche’s intriguing framing of Apollo vs. Dionysian perspectives as polar opposites in his otherwise sub-par The Birth of Tragedy awhile back, relevant for my interests in energy currents within the body, I tried reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1990) which views art and culture through a similar lens. It’s a famous book, avant-garde, boundary pushing, and I didn’t know what to expect.
I gave up on it after 50 pages.
It’s not all bad - I appreciated her writing with polemical force, her anti-orthodoxy and intellectual independence, her pagan aesthetics and her embodied, unapologetically idiosyncratic takes. She is a reactionary lesbian, which is a funny and particular pair of opposites. However, she is not a structural thinker - not at all - and she operates via associative rhetoric, where she sees everything through a sexual lens like Freud (find artifact → identify sexual dynamic → declare universal truth), which is reductive. It seems like she is ranting for attention and trying to come across as smart where it's increasingly clear there's nothing under the hood (ha).
At core the difference is this: I believe that consciousness expansion requires holding the crucifixion of opposites without collapse, while Paglia's work collapses opposites into a single polarity of sexual dynamics (Apollonian vs. Dionysian becomes order vs. chaos becomes male vs. female), and that is simply too reductive for where I am currently at. |