Renowned cultural critic Camille Paglia spoke at the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College convocation Tuesday night. A self-proclaimed “dissident feminist,” Paglia appeared to be a bracing choice of speaker. Since the publication of her seminal work, “Sexual Personae,’ in 1990, Paglia has represented a rogue figure in feminism. Her work rejects widely accepted concepts of rape culture and patriarchy, denounces what she terms “date-rape hysteria” and encourages a return to “pagan” views of sexuality.
But rather than present the kind of subversive content for which she is widely celebrated (and perhaps just as widely despised), Paglia took an unexpectedly dull route Tuesday night. Her lecture, titled “Southern Women: Old Myths and New Frontiers,” celebrated Southern womanhood by examining three of its oldest tropes: the post-menopausal Appalachian mountain woman; the Southern belle; and the African American mammy figure.
Early in her lecture Paglia struck the podium, trained her searing gaze on the audience and asserted that Southern women are the strongest of all women. The auditorium reacted with uneasy silence, rather than the “damn-right” applause I suspect Paglia anticipated. Perhaps I wasn’t the only audience member who felt we were being pandered to as students at a Southern university, spoon-fed the same kind of girl-power, shotguns-and-magnolias imagery one can find on any “Southern Belle” t-shirt. Paglia might as well have shouted, “Are you ready?!”
At several points her lecture devolved (as her essays often do) into a roast of a demographic she clearly can’t stand: rich white female students at elite Eastern universities. These pampered, infantilized, oversensitive waifs have nothing of the steely agrarian virtues of true Southern women, Paglia contended.
More troubling was her interpretation of her chosen tropes. Of the mammy figure, popularized by white writers and advertisers through the Aunt Jemima pancake mascot and the character of Mammy in “Gone with the Wind,” Paglia acknowledged that this archetype has severe racist implications, then proceeded to praise it for its affirmations of motherhood and good old-fashioned domesticity (“Pancakes are an art form!”). In doing so, she neatly sidestepped the issue of race (which, of course, entirely defines the mammy figure).
Responding to a student’s concern about this obvious whitewashing of a harmful black stereotype, she insisted that the mammy figure represents all “country women,” even reminding her of her own Italian-American grandmother. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Paglia’s grandmother, but I seriously doubt she bore much resemblance to Hattie McDaniel. Paglia’s interpretation was, in a word, uninspiring.
Despite her long-standing reputation as a provocateur, Paglia neglected to say anything truly provocative at Tuesday night’s event. She did manage to offend, but not in a style worthy of her best work, which agitates traditional notions to promote discourse. Her observations showed at best a cultural tone-deafness, at worst an old-timey strain of racism.
I expected Paglia to gall and challenge me; I only got half the package.
Charles McCrory is an English major from Florence.
