In this trans session we will look at how Paglia (who self identifies as trans) sees the role of transvestism, transsexualism and the sexual personae that go with them in the history of western art. We will also look briefly at the prevalence and meaning of sadomasochism in our history and culture.
First we start with the Great Mother sexual persona. She is nature. She “embodied the gigantism and unknowability of primeval nature.” She comes from a time before history, before agriculture. And before each one of us can speak, for she “originated in our universal experience of mother power in infancy. We are all born from a female colossus.” Our mothers for the first few years of our lives are all powerful. They dictate our pain and pleasure; nourish us and discipline us. “Therefore every person’s passage from nursery to society is an overthrow of matriarchy. As history, the idea of matriarch is spurious, but as metaphor, it is poetically resonant.” Most virgin goddess are Great Mothers; “virgin in so far as she is independent of men. She is a sexual dictator, symbolically impenetrable. Males are nonpersons…. Thus Joyce’s sensual Great Mother, Molly bloom, sleepily mulls over all the men in her life as ‘he,’ implying heir casual interchangeability. The Great Mother did not even need a male to fertilize her: the Egyptian goddess Net gives birth to Ra by parthenogenesis or self-fecundation.” The Great Mother gives life but she is also violent, capricious, ambivalent and deadly. This can be felt when dealing with nature and from a child’s perspective when handled by the mother. “From prehistory to the end of the Roman empire, the Great Mother never lost her barbarism. She is the ever-changing face of chthonian nature, now savage, now smiling. The medieval Madonna, a direct descendant of Isis, is a Great Mother with her chthonian terror removed. She has lost her roots in nature, because it is pagan nature that Christianity rose to oppose.” Later, “Romanticism, as part of its archaizing [consciously imitating something old or old-fashioned] movement, restores the mother to matriarchal power, notably in Goethe, Wordsworth, and Swinburne.”
“The goddess’ animal fecundity was cruelly dramatized in ritual. Her devotees practiced castration, breast-amputation, self-flagellation or slashing, and dismemberment of beasts. This sacrificial extremity of experience mimics the horrors of chthonian nature. Today such behavior survives only in sexual sadomasochism….I think sadomasochism an archaizing phenomenon, returning the imagination to pagan nature-worship.” All throughout history violent strikes from a superior have signaled a rite of passage and when administered by a woman or goddess, “maleness is obliterated by shocks of female power.” In some ancient cults, “The priests of the Great Mother changed sex in order to become her. Transsexualism was the severe choice, transvestism less so.”
For the first transsexual persona, Paglia adopts “the name ‘Teiresias’ for a category of androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother. He can be found in sculptures of classical river gods, in Romantic poetry (Wordsworth and Keats), and in modern popular culture (television talk-show hosts). Teiresias was turned into a woman for seven years and then back into a man. He was asked by Zeus and Hera whether men or women enjoy sexual intercourse more: his answer women by an intensity of 10:1. He is a wise man, he first divined the reason for the plague in Oedipus’ kingdom and “In The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot…[he] makes Teiresias the witness and repository of modern sexual miseries.” The underlining theme is that “Spiritual enlightenment produces feminization of the male.”
The closest we come to a reverse Teiresias is the Pythoness, “another category of androgyne, of which my best example will be the sibylline comedienne Gracie Allen.” A muse or an oracle is a man in a woman. “The Delphic oracle is a woman invaded by a male spirit. She suffers usurpation of identity, like the mental sex-transformation of great dramatists and novelists.”
Drag Queens, as a sexual persona, are some of the most enlightened for they “see through the sexual masks of society.” They play with them wonderfully displaying the outrageous mannerisms of sexual masks which emerge in a self-parodying way. “Self-parody is always sex-parody.” The Venus Barbata (bearded Venus) and the Venus Calva (bald Venus) are two sexual personae that, unlike drag queens, take the sexual masks seriously. They developed in late antiquity as the cult of Aphrodite which first “began as potent All-Mother and ended up in late antiquity as a sentimental literary convention, patron of love and beauty. In some place, her cult retained traces of her original bisexual character.” In these cults various cross dressing of priests and priestess took place. “I adopt the names Venus Barbata and Venus Calva…for certain highly aggressive, corrosively verbal movie stars like Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Ritual transvestism, then and now, is a drama of female dominance. There are religious meanings to all female impersonations, in nightclub or bedroom. A woman putting on men’s clothes merely steals social power. But a man putting on women’s clothes is searching for God. He memorializes his mother, whom he watched at the boudoir ritual of her mirror. Mothers and fathers are not in the same cosmic league. Fatherhood is short, motherhood long, for earth is a mother of ever-changing costume, green to brown and back….the pagan tradition survives in Rio de Janeiro at Carnival, in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, in Philadelphia on New Year’s Day and everywhere on Halloween.”
Female transvestism is different from male transvestism. Neither drag kings nor butch lesbians nor women in general have a fetishistic relation to male clothes. It is usually a utilitarian attraction: comfort, social freedom, or authority. Consider for example that many of the transvestite women in Shakespeare had a good practical reason, (Viola in Twelfth Night, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Innogen in Cymbeline, Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Rosalind in As You Like It). “Male transvestites are not only sexually stimulated by female clothing but may require it for orgasm….Women are not sexual conceptualizers, just as they are not lust-murderers…. For men, female clothing is religious or cultic. It is the costume of the mother, with whom the son unites by ritual impersonation, like priests of Cybele. The female transvestite seeks merely to pass….But the male transvestite is his own best voyeur, exploiting his internalized eye for maximum excitement. The female transvestite arouses others, not herself.”
Voyeurism, pleasure in watching, “is the relation of every reader to every novel, of every spectator to every painting, play, and film. It is present in our study of biography and history, and even in our conversations about others.
“Voyeurism is the amoral aesthetic of the aggressive western eye. It is the cloud of contemplation that enwraps us as sexual personae, transporting us unseen across space and time.” If Christianity condemns voyeurism, paganism promotes it as a “feast for the eyes,” where the sexual personae are the most decedent expression and therefore most fun and entertaining.
While the term Sadomasochism is relatively new in western art history the acts and rituals that go with it are far older. “For two thousand years, the torture of martyred saints, as well as of Christ, has filled western imagination with sadomasochistic reverie.” Paglia gives several more examples of ritual sexual torture and sacrifice in various time periods from antiquity that rival the cruelties in the works of the Marquis de Sade. “This sacrificial extremity of experience mimics the horrors of chthonian nature. Today such behavior survives only in sexual sadomasochism, universally labeled perverse. I think sadomasochism an archaizing phenomenon, returning the imagination to pagan nature-worship.” Paglia sees the works of de Sade as a realist point by point refutation of the idealist works of Rousseau who advocated for a natural equality, peace and harmony. When these notions weaken or dissolve the existing hierarchies, “when political and religious authority weakens, hierarchy reasserts itself in sex, as the archaizing phenomenon of sadomasochism. Freedom makes new prisons….Rousseau’s masochistic subordination to women comes from his overidealization of nature and emotion.” This overidealization of freedom and love; of nature and emotion forgets the fear of freedom and anxiety of love, it forgets the danger that is always there in nature and emotion. “Sadomasochism will always appear in the freest times, in imperial Rome or the late twentieth century. It is a pagan ritual of riddance, stilling anxiety and fear.” It stills the fear and anxiety that the loss of formal hierarchies gave rise to. “Sadomasochism, I suggested, is a symptom of cultural thirst for hierarchy. Religion is misguided when it relaxes its ritualism. The imagination longs for subordination and will seek it elsewhere.” The interesting thing about S&M is that the hierarchies it plays with are switchable; they can mimic or overturn the existing hierarchies. “‘All sexuality entails some degree of theater.’ Sex contains an element of the abstract and transpersonal, which only sadomasochism forthrightly acknowledges….Hailed in the Sixties as a sexual liberator, Sade is actually the most scholarly documenter of sex’s subjection to hierarchical orders.”