Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia is an American academic, social critic, and writer. For much of her career she taught humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, an institution that closed in 2024. Her name is mainly associated with feminist debate and with criticism of post-structuralism. She has been described as a 'post-feminist feminist', a controversial figure who moves between high culture and popular culture.

She was born in 1947 in Endicott, New York, into a family of Italian origin: her mother came from Lazio as a child, and her father's relatives came from Campania. She grew up on a farm near Oxford, New York, and later in Syracuse, where her father, a teacher of Romance languages, sparked her interest in art through books on French art history. She studied at Harpur College, part of Binghamton University, and then at Yale, where she earned her doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation on the androgyne in literature and art.

Her academic career advanced slowly. After teaching at Bennington College, she left in 1979 following a long dispute with the administration. For years she combined temporary teaching jobs in Connecticut with journalism. Her book Sexual Personae, finished in the early 1980s, could not find a publisher until 1990, and its success made her known.

Her style is direct and provocative. She defends a view of sex and culture that rejects many ideas fashionable in the 1970s, especially some strands of feminism, and she keeps a critical distance from postmodernism. Her recurring themes include sexuality, androgyny, film, and the visual arts. For years she wrote a column for Salon.com.

Her legacy lies in bringing intellectual argument into the press and in provoking debate about feminism, sex, and popular culture. She describes herself as an atheist and has publicly disagreed with figures such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.