American writer, scholar, iconoclast, speaker, academic, social critic and neo-pagan, known for–among other things–her anti-feminist backlash. Said by some to have a Napoleon complex, she is one of the more colorful and controversial writers to come out of the ’80s and ’90s intelligencia. She taught English for 20 years while garnering rejection slips through the ’70s. She offers her thoughts on everything from pagan sexuality to Hillary Clinton to Gay Stalinism. With a rapier-sharp wit and tongue, she knows who’s hip and who’s hot on the campuses of American in the ’70s to ’90s.
Paglia was born the oldest daughter of Pasquale Paglia, who was professor of Romance languages at LeMoyne, a Jesuit college in Syracuse, N Y and his wife, Lydia, a bank teller. She was an only child until she was 14 when dispossessed by a sibling, a quiet child who reportedly felt more like a boy than a girl. She attended the State University of New York at Binghamton, and went to Yale in 1968 to begin graduate studies in English. She graduated with the highest honors in the class in 1968, earning her Ph.D. from Yale.
She also began a career of bashing the women’s movement. Teaching at Bennington College from 1972 to 1980, she again had intellectual clashes due to her own idea of feminism. A fist-fight at a dance in 1978 – Paglia was known to take on physical accosting – led to her departure from Bennington. She spent the few years after that collecting unemployment and teaching at Wesleyan and part-time at Yale.
In 1984, Paglia moved to Philadelphia. The following year, Yale bought the manuscript of her book, “Sexual Personae,” which had evolved from her Ph.D. dissertation and had been rejected by seven New York publishers. She is presently Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Her other books have included “Sex, Art and American Culture,” 1992, “Vampires and Tramps: New Essays,” 1995. Her fourth book, a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” has been published by the British Institute in its Film Classics Series.
An attractive 5′ 3 “, she was a lesbian until 1982 when she began dating men as well as women and now describes herself as bisexual.
Her most recent book is Glittering Images (2012), a history of the visual arts. She is a critic of American feminism and of post-structuralism as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
For over a decade, Paglia was the partner of artist Alison Maddex. Paglia legally adopted Maddex’s son (who was born in 2002). In 2007, the couple separated.
Link to Wikipedia biography