by Robert Schmad
American tax dollars are funding an array of book projects covering topics like “trans reproduction” and the “neglected queer history” of homosexuality in post-colonial Ireland, federal records show.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) spends hundreds of thousands of tax dollars a year funding academics to write full-length books on a variety of subjects, according to grant records. While many of the books center on innocuous topics, like the history of criminal procedure in China or philosopher Immanuel Kant, others the NEH funded in 2023 and 2024 veer into left-wing topics.
Many of the projects in the latter category concern human sexuality.
In August the NEH will begin disbursing $60,000 in funding a book project titled “Trans Reproduction: Creating Productive And Socially Fit Transgender People,” according to grant materials. The project seeks to contribute to the humanities by “bringing trans people’s voices into studies of reproductive health” and examining “how transgender people figure into the genealogy of U.S. reproductive politics.”
Another federally-funded book project in a similar vein, dubbed “A Social Biography Of Same-Sex Desire In Postcolonial Ireland, ” is a seven-chapter text concerning the “neglected queer history between Irish independence and the rise of the Irish gay rights movement,” grant records show. The book, which the NEH awarded a $6,000 federal grant in June 2023, will commemorate “the lives ruined by state-enforced homophobia” while also arguing “that the persecution of same-sex desiring men was central to Irish postcolonial state-building.”
Taxpayers are also footing a $60,000 bill for a biography on the “very first openly gay black science fiction writer in history,” according to grant records. “As a gay black intellectual, [Samuel] Delany was the first writer to take the speculative genre in politically challenging new directions, creating fictional worlds with black protagonists, queer and transgender characters, and gay sexual relationships,” the grant’s description reads.
This #PrideMonth learn about the challenges faced by gender-bending #HarlemRenaissance performer and musician Gladys Bentley in the late 1940s & early 1950s due to her #gender identity, with the #NEHgrant-funded @Unladylike2020 series: https://t.co/CM7sc6R6Bb
#Pride2021 #Pride pic.twitter.com/ybk3xo5KUz
— NEH (@NEHgov) June 3, 2021
Racial issues were another focus of books funded by the NEH.
One NEH-funded book project in this area will receive $6,000 from the agency in July to document “a new intellectual history of black feminist theory and praxis in Latin America,” according to grant records. A project that received a $60,000 NEH grant in August 2023 explores a similar topic, documenting how black activists in Argentina use “transnational black feminist politics to convert experiences of pain into purpose.”
Another taxpayer-funded book sought to explore “the historical lack of a Latinx presence in commemorative practices” and to lay out how “Latinx artists both engage with and resist traditional modes of memorialization,” records show. The project received $6,000 in funding between June and August 2023.
On top of that, a self-described “groundbreaking e-book” will cost taxpayers $30,000 to explore how black women poets clash with the “norms developed by elite white male authors” that “often favor subdued performance and apolitical content,” according to federal records. A similar project was awarded $60,000 in public funds to explore the impact of “Something Good—Negro Kiss,” an old silent film, going viral on social media and “the significance of its moving image of black love.”
“Girl Scouts Of The USA: Race, Feminism, And American Empire,” explores the Girl Scouts’ “complex struggles over race, civil rights, feminism, and the legacies of empire and colonialism,” according to grant records. NEH awarded the project $6,000 in June 2023.
Former President Donald Trump attempted to cut funding to the NEH during his tenure in office, though failed as Congress advanced budget legislation boosting the agency’s budget. Trump argued for cuts citing the “notable funding support provided by private and other public sources” to the arts and humanities.
NEH did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Robert Schmad is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “People Under Trans Flag” by Lisett Kruusimäe.
