No she's not. She's not a serious academic and nobody who studies Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault would take her seriously. She's a propagandist and entertainer. She's not even a popularizer of complex ideas because I honestly think she either doesn't understand the thinkers she critiques or she does understand them but decides to score cheap points by attacking straw man arguments.
If you want an easy way to engage with the ideas these French thinkers put forward I highly suggest listening to Stephen West's "Philosophize This" podcast. He not only covers "French Philosophers" but much of Western philosophy and does so in a pretty accessible and relatively unbiased manner.
Although honestly, it's just as important to understand other thinkers in the Western philosophy tradition to grasp where thinkers are coming from.
Having said all that, yes, there are many people in American academia whose understanding of these thinkers is just as bad if not worse than Paglia's and these folks give academic study of French philosophy a bad name. Paglia has built a career of attacking people like these, not by holding them to higher standards but by merely sinking to their level and engaging in simple-minded, yet entertaining, polemics.
But it's always going to the be the case that poor thinkers abound. There's also a lot of very poor thinkers in CS, physics and other so-called "hard science" fields. It's just that they're a lot easier to ignore because they're so boring.
If you want an easy way to engage with the ideas these French thinkers put forward I highly suggest listening to Stephen West's "Philosophize This" podcast. He not only covers "French Philosophers" but much of Western philosophy and does so in a pretty accessible and relatively unbiased manner.
The "Introducing" series of books can also be a good resource for understanding complex thinkers: https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Foucault-Graphic-Chris-Ho...
Although honestly, it's just as important to understand other thinkers in the Western philosophy tradition to grasp where thinkers are coming from.
Having said all that, yes, there are many people in American academia whose understanding of these thinkers is just as bad if not worse than Paglia's and these folks give academic study of French philosophy a bad name. Paglia has built a career of attacking people like these, not by holding them to higher standards but by merely sinking to their level and engaging in simple-minded, yet entertaining, polemics.
But it's always going to the be the case that poor thinkers abound. There's also a lot of very poor thinkers in CS, physics and other so-called "hard science" fields. It's just that they're a lot easier to ignore because they're so boring.