Paglia’s Central Myth

This piece aims to rescue Camille Paglia from waves of unsympathetic critics. The article asks what it is that she actually stands for. Employing the religious metaphors of “fallen” and “restored”, as well as the idea of “sacraments”, it argues that what is uppermost in the work of Paglia is a concern with a fallen state connected to sex and gender alignment (disempowering for both men and women) and a risen state in which self-fulfilment is effected by transgenderism. For Paglia, Graham argues, the social purpose of literature is to help individuals understand their own transgender destiny: writers provide models for that “migration”.