A review by waxwingslane
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia

2.0

While the giants on whose shoulders Paglia stands are extenuated by their positions at the beginnings of psychology, anthropology, and other social sciences, this author has no excuse citing works like The Golden Bough in 1990, long after their academic disaccredation. With propositions as droll as “cats are female animals” and “fascism is homoerotic”, Paglia is intentionally contrary to the point of senselessness. Sexual Personae’s strength is in psychoanalysis, though psychoanalysis reveals as much of the analyst as it does in the patient, as the analyst is the prism through which the neurosis is divined. A psychoanalysis applied to all humanity, this work reveals little about its subject due to reliance on bunk science, but a humanity’s worth about Paglia herself.